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THE MASTER LIGHT 

AN ATTEMPT TO READ THE TRUTH OF LIFE 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

AN ATTEMPT TO READ THE 
TRUTH OF LIFE 



BY 

W. ELSWORTH LAWSON 

M 



"Our little systems have their day, 

They have their day, and cease to be; 
They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And thou, Lord, art more than they" 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 






COPTKIOHT, 1915 

Bt W. ELSWOETH LAWSON 




DEC 17 1915 



©CU418098 



BY WAY OF DEDICATION 

Light dawns and dies; 
The hours between see little done. 

Power comes, and flies 
Before its treasures have been won. 
Unveiled an instant, truth with art appears; 
Then vain my search through their congenial spheres. 
Impatient years 
Turn scornfully on that Vve made; 

New hopes, new fears 
Beset me as my words are weighed. 

Light dawns and dies! 
But woman 1 s love escapes the night. 

Power comes and flies! 
But woman 1 s faith outstays the flight. 
Like eagles 1 wings thy love and faith have straight 
Up-borne my spirit in its dark estate. 

Love consecrate, 
This reading of the truth of life 

I dedicate 
To thee, my critic, comrade, wife. 



PREFACE 

The following pages are not addressed to 
scientists, philosophers or theologians who 
would find little that is new in them, but 
to the average man in the street who, more 
or less wistfully, longs for some central and 
controlling ideal to which the confusing the- 
ories and speculations of our day may be 
brought for judgment. And they appeal 
to him with the sincere desire of encouraging 
him to think for himself about their claim 
concerning the significance of the mind of 
Christ as the measure of all things. 

Only a mere fraction of those ancient 
problems which still vex the modern mind 
are treated here, and even these but briefly 
and suggestively, and more as contributions 
to method than to knowledge. My aim has 
been not to solve problems but rather to 
help the reader a few steps along the path 
at the end of which, I am convinced, light 
and truth abide. 

The incompleteness of this little volume, 

[vii] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

both in the problems chosen and in the treat- 
ment of them, must be apparent to every- 
one. A friendly theological critic, to whom 
these pages were submitted, has pointed out 
that there is no discussion of miracles here, 
and no real "facing of the problem of evil." 
To both these charges I plead guilty. I 
desired to write a small book that could be 
read at one serious sitting; and it appears 
to me that the man in the street cares little 
about the first of these problems, while con- 
cerning the second he cares so much that 
any positive and constructive discussion of 
it would have expanded the book far beyond 
the modest limits I had set. 

But there is one omission which, face to 
face with the seeming breakdown of Euro- 
pean civilization, not alone the theologian 
but also the very man for whom I have 
written may consider serious. There is no 
chapter on "The Master Light and Social 
and Political Thought." It may be worth 
while to state that such a chapter was 
planned and practically written when the 
shock of war shattered its otiose optimism 
into a thousand fragments. It was written 
around the principle of "Fraternalism" — a 

[viii] 



PREFACE 

word which I had fondly hoped to recover 
from those societies within Society which 
have appropriated it, and apply it to Soci- 
ety as a whole. I still venture to think that 
the principle is valid and workable, that the 
solution of social, national and international 
relations can be reached only by a thorough, 
consistent and world-wide application of it. 
But the problems involved in such an appli- 
cation are too numerous and intricate to be 
discussed within the compass of a short 
chapter. Besides, though I see the ques- 
tions, I cannot always discern the answers. 
More time, more experience, and more 
thought are necessary before that chapter 
can ever be re-written. But it is absolutely 
certain to me that the mind of Christ — not 
the minds of the social agitator, the trader, 
the armament-maker, the diplomat and the 
militarist — must control human relations in 
the new world, at the gates of which we now 
stand in awe and fear. 

It may seem to many people a colossal 
conceit, if not an actual blasphemy, to assert 
in these awful and heart-sickening days that 
"we have the mind of Christ. ,, With hearts 
all one monstrous hate, and blinded with 

[ix] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

passion, the militarists of Europe have pi- 
loted their nations into a maelstrom of 
blood. One nation has already gone mad, 
and others seem trembling on the verge of 
madness. What burden of horror our hearts 
may yet have to bear, who can foretell? 
And yet all that violence and deceit, all 
those cruelties and ruthless murders do not 
destroy the truth of this book. They are 
but the hideous handiwork of the despairing 
savagery of the decivilized breaking final 
bounds only to perish forever in the ultimate 
triumph of the aroused and cleansed con- 
science of humanity. Grieve over them as 
we must, they ought not to drive us to pes- 
simism and atheism. We have the mind of 
Christ. And the great thing in all these 
sad days is not the barbarity and monstrous 
wickedness to which they are witness, but 
the shining fact that the rest of the world 
— so much vaster and more complex than 
any world which the first Christians knew 
— does not view these atrocities of hatred 
with indifference or complacency, but with 
a profound, sincere and open condemnation. 
This is the big thing in our day. It is a 
proof, if proof be needed, that the mind of 

[*] 



PREFACE 

Christ is still constraining the minds of men ; 
and it is fraught with hope for the future. 
If human interests seem to have been well- 
nigh strangulated by that octopus of politics 
miscalled national interests, the end is not 
yet. A new theory of national honor and 
a new international creed will be wrought 
out of the ruins of both which now strew the 
sodden fields of Europe; and not national 
interests any more, but the world's interests 
will dictate the policies of the day after 
tomorrow. 

Meanwhile our duty as Christians is 
surely clear. We need not join in the stri- 
dent chorus of denunciation of the church 
for her failure to prevent the war. With 
a great and sad sincerity, the church herself 
feels the shame of that failure now. What 
we have to do is to insist that in the future 
the mind of Christ must have its rightful 
and supreme place not alone in our indi- 
vidual and social affairs, but also in the 
larger affairs of our nation and of the world. 
It is not for the Church to adopt any other 
mind, however popular and vociferous it 
may momentarily be. She has the mind of 
Christ; and if the accusation of Lord Bal- 

[xi] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

four is not to be proved true: "That the 
Church was powerless when it came to any 
of the serious crises facing humanity/' then 
she must awake to the consciousness of her 
incomparably precious possession and the 
splendid opportunity which it offers her. 
The tremendous task before the Church of 
today is that of being the outspoken and 
implacable enemy of militarism in all its 
forms. This is the Holy War in which we 
must enlist all the forces of the Church. 
And "there is no discharge in that war." 
Militarism must be destroyed root and 
branch, or it will eventually destroy the 
Church. Will the Church, as the declared 
exponent of the mind of Christ, be equal 
in courage as she is in power for the task? 
If not, if in her cowardice she again makes 
friends with militarism, then she will surely 
perish; for the mind of Christ and the 
"Hymn of Hate" are incompatible. My 
own faith is that she will rise to the great- 
ness of her opportunity, that not the Church 
but militarism will finally pass away and be 
but a dream of horror to the awakened 
world. Nothing short of permanent inter- 
national peace can ever satisfy us now. 

[xii] 



PREFACE 

And though it must be the work of states- 
men to create the legal instruments of such a 
peace, it remains the business of the Church 
to demand it. If only we cared enough we 
could have it. Therefore let the Church 
awake and 

"Stand forth for Peace and win a deathless name. 
Peace is not peace that sings its battle songs, 
And sets its cannon on a hundred hills; 
That points its guns, North, East, and West and 

South 
Towards friendly harbors, ready at a word 
To call friends enemies and targets — no ! 
Peace is the great affirmative of God ; 
It knows no armies, arms, nor armaments: 
For armies, arms, and armaments deal death, 
And Peace holds conquests in the strength of life/' 

W. E. L. 

Foxboro, Mass. 
September, 1915. 



[xiii] 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface ...... vii 

I. The Master Light and the Christian 

Consciousness .... 3 

II. The Master Light and the Bible . 29 

III. The Master Light and the Universe . 53 
IV. The Master Light and the Being of 

God ...... 75 

V. The Master Light and the Value of 

Man ...... 97 

VI. Personality and the Truth . . 123 



[XV] 



THE MASTER LIGHT AND THE 
CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 



"But we have the mind of Christ." 1 Cor. 2:16. 

"The Greeks, in other respects so advanced, knew neither 
God nor even man in their true universality. The gods of 
the Greeks were only particular powers of the mind; and 
the universal God, the God of all nations, was to the Athe- 
nians still a God concealed. They believed in the same 
way that an absolute gulf separated themselves from the 
barbarians. Man as man was not then recognized to be 
of infinite worth and to have infinite rights." W. Wallace, 
"The Logic of Hegel" (trans.), p. 293. 

"We have really to ask what the 'secret of Jesus' was. 
... It lay in a new Doctrine and a new Temper: a new 
doctrine concerning the nature of God and the nature of 
the religious relation of men to God and to each other; 
and such an unparalleled temper of complete identification 
with the doctrine as was even more new in the history of 
the world. ... It must be the chief aim of any religious 
method that can justly lay claim to being Christian, to 
bring about, in all the minds upon which it acts, the pos- 
session of this secret of the Founder." G. H. Howison, 
"The Limits of Evolution/ 3 p. 243 ff. 

"Since much at first, in deed and word, 
Lay simply and sufficiently exposed, 
Had grown (or else my soul was grown to match, 
Fed through such years, familiar with such light, 
Guarded and guided still to see and speak) 
Of new significance and fresh result; 
What first were guessed as points, I now knew stars, 
And named them in the Gospel I have writ." 

R. Browning, "A Death in the Desert." 



CHAPTER I 

THE MASTER LIGHT AND THE 
CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 

The consciousness of the place of Christ 
in the modern mind is not nearly so supreme 
and vital as we popularly imagine it to be. 
We talk a great deal about Christ, we sing 
of him, we read and think of him, but our 
spiritual and intellectual apprehension of 
his transcendent significance for our age is 
curiously small. Emotionally he may seem 
to reign, intellectually he has scarcely any 
conscious hold of us at all. In commerce, 
in domestic politics, in world-politics, in our 
philosophies of life and in the deeper prob- 
lems of humanity the intelligent considera- 
tion of the mind of Christ has little place. 
The intellectual timidity which has over- 
taken so large a part of the Christian com- 
munity of our time would seem to be the 
direct result of this failure in appreciation. 
Multitudes of men and women, professing 

[3] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

allegiance to Christ, yet fear to face the 
literary, historical, intellectual and moral 
problems which the last half a century has 
forced upon us. Are we, then, upon whom 
the ends of the world have come, utterly 
without a measure of right and truth, a 
principle of interpretation and judgment? 
It is the purpose of this little book to answer 
that question by a discussion of the signifi- 
cance of the mind of Christ for our modern 
problems. An exhaustive treatment of these 
problems is out of the question. They are 
too deep in some directions, too fluid in 
others for such treatment, at least by the 
present expositor. But if we cannot solve 
these problems, we may be put in the way 
of solving them. I shall rest content, there- 
fore, if I can help you to see the great con- 
structive principle upon which I believe 
that the Church of today, and still more the 
Church of tomorrow, must take an intelli- 
gent stand. 

I 

The history of thought seems to declare 
that man has always contemplated existence 
with wonder and awe. Wherever men have 



CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 

spoken the problem of the meaning and the 
measure of life has been earnestly debated. 
From Thales to Eucken, from Job and Ms- 
chylus to Dante and Shakspere, and from 
them to the latest poet and dramatist men 
have directed the energies of their intellect 
toward the solution of this problem. The 
speculations concerning the ultimate mean- 
ing of the universe form one of the most 
interesting chapters of man's intellectual 
and spiritual travail. With a wealth of 
interpretation and luminous criticism, Dr. 
George A. Gordon, in the second chapter 
of "The Christ of Today," has pointed out 
that in the "vast and profound chapter of 
ancient thought, without whose mastery one 
cannot so much as find one's way in modern 
speculation," there are four divisions, four 
profound sentences uttered by four different 
thinkers within a period of time extending 
over five centuries. They form a progres- 
sive series of solutions on the problem of 
life. Let me state them as simply as I can 
because they lead directly to the subject of 
this chapter. 

Until five hundred years before the birth 
of Jesus the philosophy of Greece moved 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

largely under the banner of the famous doe- 
trine of the Eternal Flux. That is to say, 
putting it briefly, men thought that the 
world of experience was the result of con- 
tinuous irresponsible mechanical change 
without either a personal guide or a par- 
ticular purpose. 

Then Protagoras arose and struck the 
first blow against this otiose theory. He 
tried to reach a point from which this ka- 
leidoscopic life of ours could be judged. 
He said, "Man is the measure of all things." 
And with that saying a new period in the 
history of thought began. To the problem 
of Nature it added the problem of Per- 
sonality. Before Protagoras men had been 
content with speculations about things. 
Now began the long speculation about 
mind, the search for a criterion of truth and 
of the end of life. He said that it was vain 
for man to study the universe as something 
outside of himself; man was a universe 
within a universe and must take himself as 
the standard of judgment. The only real 
thing within his reach was himself. Now 
this was a revolutionary idea, even though 
in the thought of its originator it seems 

[*] 



CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 

never to have risen from the individual to 
the race. Protagoras was in the familiar 
position of one who cannot see the forest 
for the trees. "Men hindered him from see- 
ing man." Thus his standard of judgment 
was not the human understanding, but the 
understanding of the individual. " Things 
are to me," he said, "as they appear to me, 
and to you as they appear to you." From 
this point of view every man is a self-elected 
judge of all things, and intellectual chaos 
is come again. And whenever intellectual 
chaos prevails, moral chaos, in which every 
man does that which is right in his own eyes, 
is never far off; and there remains no such 
thing as a standard of truth, of beauty and 
of goodness which should be binding upon 
mankind. Yet in spite of the confusion 
which the Protagorean principle engen- 
dered, it was fraught with great results. 
It ushered in an age of criticism based upon 
a new consciousness of self, and it was the 
forerunner of logic. 

Seventeen years before the death of Pro- 
tagoras, Plato was born; and by and by 
his mighty mind concerned itself with the 
problem of the universe. Always in the 

[X] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

interest of ethical ideas, Plato worked over 
the theories of his predecessors and, through 
the mask of his beloved master Socrates, he 
exposed the error of Protagoras. From 
Socrates he had learned the famous maxim 
"Know thyself," and in that knowledge he 
protested against the intellectual and moral 
subjectivism of his day. What Plato really 
did in those great Socratic dialogues was to 
bring God into the problem. God and man 
were, according to him, akin to each other, 
the mind of man being an offshoot, a frag- 
ment of the Infinite mind. And so, he 
argued, the whole and not the part must 
be our standard of judgment. In "The 
Laws," the final fruit of his mature mind, 
he says: "God is the measure of all things, 
in a sense far higher than any man could 
be, as the common saying affirms." Else- 
where he declares that the supreme business 
of man is to climb the heights whereon God 
stands and to "measure truth, beauty and 
goodness by the thought, and love, and life 
of the Eternal." But how man was to climb 
that desirable stairway to God he nowhere 
makes plain. Yet his saying, "God is the 
measure of all things," remained as a chal- 

[8] 



CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 

lenge to the intellect and conscience of 
succeeding generations. 

Twenty-seven years before the death of 
Plato, Aristotle was born. He became first 
the disciple and afterwards the rival of 
Plato. The teaching of Aristotle does not, 
at first sight, seem to go beyond that of 
Protagoras, for he declares that all specula- 
tion on the meaning and purpose of life 
necessarily centers in personality. Man is 
still the measure of all things. But when 
in his "Ethics" he is discussing the virtues, 
we find him asking (as, indeed, Socrates had 
asked before him) what kind of man must 
be the measure of all things. Thus we come 
upon the last answer of Greek philosophy: 
"The perfect man is the perfect judge of 
all things." Here, then, more than three 
hundred years before Christ we have the 
final verdict of philosophy face to face with 
the vital question of the meaning of life — 
the perfect man, the man of moral insight 
as, in the last resort, the standard of all 
truth and right. But to the inquiry, Where 
is this perfect man? Greece furnished no 
answer. He was a sublime ideal, the crea- 
tion of the world's hunger, but the world 

[9] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

had to wait three more centuries for his 
appearing. 

Then Paul, whose religious genius and 
insight was as exalted and intellectual as the 
genius of the Greek philosophers, began 
where they left off. In Athens he noted 
the intellectual and religious confusion 
which was undoubtedly one of the results 
of the destructive criticism and radical scep- 
ticism of the final stage of Hellenism. Now 
thought and conduct, the mental vision and 
the moral purpose, go hand in hand. When 
you leave the academy for the street the 
real outcome of its teaching may be ob- 
served. And perhaps nowhere else in 
Greece were the disastrous results of intel- 
lectual confusion more apparent than in the 
populous commercial city of Corinth. The 
"abysmal immorality" of Corinthian society 
had turned the city's name into an epithet. 
To be a "Corinthian" had come to mean 
that a man recognized no standard of either 
thought or conduct. 

It was to Corinth that Paul came direct 
from his sad experience at Athens. Here 
he labored for eighteen months, then went 
on to Ephesus, leaving behind him a Chris- 

[10] 



CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 

tian church. Robbed of his leadership the 
congregation drifted into the confusion of 
its neighbors. And at Ephesus Paul began 
to receive the disquieting news that subver- 
sive moral theories, conflicting philosophies 
and personal animosities threatened the life 
of the infant church. With an intellectual 
courage which it is difficult for us rightly 
to estimate, he wrote a letter to those degen- 
erate Greeks in which he sought to establish 
an ultimate criterion of judgment. He 
maintained that the Christian church was 
independent of any theories which the 
conflicting minds of the Corinthians might 
invent. It possessed within itself the meas- 
ure of all things. "But we have the mind of 
Christ," he declared, and pointed them to 
the Supreme Person for whom the Greek 
philosophers had long waited. 

Now it is not asserted here that Paul in 
any personal way connected his declaration 
with the philosophic thought of the past. 
We do not know what his acquaintance was 
with Greek thought. But it is maintained 
that, whether deliberately or by happy inde- 
pendence, this saying does connect itself 
with, and complete that great chapter of 

[ii] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

human speculation. To the apostle, Christ 
was the measure of all things — his Presence, 
his Lordship, the illuminating power of his 
character, and the redeeming power of his 
cross covered every realm of thought and 
conduct. The mind of Christ was the mas- 
ter light through which all the relations of 
man in the world within and without him 
were to be read and tested. And this mind, 
he asserted, was the common possession of 
the disciples of Christ. He recognized, as 
all great teachers must, the different levels 
both of intellect and spiritual receptivity in 
men. But his concept of the mind of Christ 
was no esoteric thing; all might receive it, 
all might grow into awareness of possessing 
it. Here, then, in Paul's exaltation of the 
mind of Christ as the measure of all things, 
the search of man for the norm of truth and 
beauty and goodness culminated. And the 
supreme task of succeeding generations has 
been the one task of interpretation* 



[12] 



CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 



II 

We have now to ask how Paul reached 
this great assurance of possession. It may 
be as well to admit at once that a full answer 
to this question must not be expected. We 
are too far from Paul's day, and the record 
of his experience is too meagre for confident 
utterance. Still, certain facts lie plainly 
before us in the New Testament. There is 
the account of his initial experience on the 
road to Damascus. Whatever we may think 
about that experience we cannot refuse to 
recognize its profound influence upon his 
thought. It was not simply that he was 
convinced that the risen Christ had ap- 
peared to him, but also, and pre-eminently, 
that God had revealed His Son in him. A 
mere vision of Jesus in the skies could not 
account for the sudden transformation in 
the mind of Paul. To whatever there was 
of objectivity in that vision was added a 
deep interior revelation. When, twenty 
years afterward, he wrote, "It is God who 
shined in our hearts to give the light of the 
knowledge of God in the face of Jesus 

[13] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

Christ," he must surely have been thinking 
of the light that shone upon and within him 
near the gates of Damascus. It is impos- 
sible, I think, to put too great an emphasis 
on this initial experience; though it is 
equally impossible accurately to describe its 
content. It will be sufficient if we discern in 
it a complete spiritual revolution, the intel- 
lectual and moral consequences of which 
only time could enfold. It is not intended 
here to minimize any preparation for this 
experience that Paul must have undergone, 
that "kicking against the goad," of which 
he was conscious ; but only to recognize the 
supreme psychological and spiritual worth 
of the experience itself. The experience, 
not the preparation, is the great thing. 

The second fact to note is that the apostle 
spent some time with the disciples at Da- 
mascus. Here the story of Jesus would be 
related to him afresh. With the public 
version of that story he must have been 
already acquainted, but with what a differ- 
ent accent it would now fall upon his ears! 
How the gracious words and deeds of the 
crucified Christ would be eagerly treasured 
up by this new and bewildered disciple! 

[14] 



CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 

These "certain days" in Damascus must 
have been filled with surprising information, 
serious questioning and rapid mental read- 
justments. New points of view, new inter- 
pretations of history, new insights into 
human and Divine relationships — all this, 
and how much more would follow as the 
mind of Paul came in contact with the mind 
of the historical Jesus. Yet we can scarcely 
imagine him telling the disciples in Damas- 
cus, "we have the mind of Christ." 

Then followed those three important 
years of silence and meditation in Arabia — 
the period of orientation out of which the 
gospel of Paul came. How can we perform 
the task of interpreting those three years! 
It is impossible. Yet from his authentic 
letters we may discern something of the 
progress of Paul's experience. We can see 
the mind of Paul revising his own history 
and that of his race in the new light that 
had flashed within him on the road to Da- 
mascus. In that same light all the bare 
facts of the history of Jesus, his teaching, 
his deeds, his personality, as these had been 
related to him, would receive a new inter- 
pretation and an ever-deepening signifi- 

[15] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

cance. And as the days went on, and he 
remained devoutly obedient to his new 
spiritual experience, his consciousness of 
fellowship with the spirit of Christ must 
have deepened and developed, and with it 
a new consciousness of himself. Before the 
mind of Paul the great figure of the Son 
of Man stood out in its unique sublimity, 
and he began to see behind and within it 
the mind of Christ. Not merely the 
thoughts and teachings of Jesus but the 
very mind, the amazing spiritual and moral 
consciousness out of which those thoughts 
and teachings sprang, now filled his days. 
It was out of this double consciousness of 
himself and his Lord that Paul's new crit- 
icism of life came: a criticism having its 
roots far back, it may be, in the Greek doc- 
trine of self-consciousness, but now, for the 
first time in history, dominated by the mind 
of Christ. 

When Paul came out of Arabia to begin 
his ministry to the Gentiles he might have 
been able to say: "I have the mind of 
Christ." But during those twenty years of 
missionary service he found his experience 
repeated again and again in the experience 

[16] 



CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 

of others. The conception of a new society, 
a new humanity, being created by Christ, 
came to complete his own individual experi- 
ence. He saw that the mind of Christ was 
a social gift, that the spirit of life in Christ 
Jesus was shed abroad throughout the new 
Christian community, each member sharing 
in it as he subjected himself to the rule, the 
authority and the redeeming power of the 
Eternal Living Lord. And thus at last he 
could write to the church in Corinth, "But 
we have the mind of Christ." 

It has been said that Paul seems never to 
have recovered from his surprise at the dis- 
covery of what Jesus Christ meant for the 
intellect. And I think that is true. Many 
passages of sustained eloquence and rapt 
meditation in the epistles testify that Christ 
remained to him the world's supreme spirit- 
ual and intellectual possession. In the per- 
fect man Christ Jesus he found the "his- 
torical expression of the Eternal Son in the 
bosom of the Father." That is to say that 
Jesus became to Paul not only the revela- 
tion of the incarnation of God in humanity, 
but also the abiding symbol of the incarna- 
tion of humanity in God. Here was One 

[17] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

who did not climb by any laborious Platonic 
stairway to the heights whereon God stood. 
He was there! And his very presence there 
was the attestation of the God who is, and 
the declaration of the man that should yet 
be. This truth of the abiding fellowship of 
man and God, of which the Person of Christ 
was the ideal symbol and assurance, was to 
Paul the central message he had to deliver. 
The Gospel to him was not only a message 
to the heart and conscience, but also a mes- 
sage to the intellect, a message which lighted 
up the mystery of existence, and presented 
to his mind a universe whose supreme value 
to God was seen in the Cross of Christ. 
Of course there is a Christ of feeling in 
Paul's theology, but he never subordinated 
to it the Christ of truth. To read his letters 
is to be brought into vivid contact with a 
mind always alert and constantly occupying 
itself with the deepest problems of life. And 
to the solution of these problems Paul 
brought to bear, with an exalted imagina- 
tion and an indestructible faith, the mind of 
Christ. 



[18] 



CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 



III 

Here, then, is the standard which we need 
to bring back into all our thinking if we 
would save the church of Christ in our day 
from intellectual and moral sterility. It is 
a modern commonplace to speak of the dif- 
ference between our problems and those 
which exercised the mind of Paul. The 
small and simple world of his day has van- 
ished in the various and infinitely complex 
world which science and literature, explo- 
ration and invention have thrown open to 
us. A comparison between the philosophy 
of history, as exhibited in the Epistle to the 
Romans, for example, and that which ob- 
tains in our day would be very fruitful in 
suggestions. It is not enough to say that 
Israel and Gentiles have given place to East 
and West; for East and West, except as 
mere territorial divisions, are rapidly ceasing 
to be. Science and art, philosophy and the- 
ology are no longer merely local, nor even 
national achievements; they are assuming 
world relationships. The creative imagina- 
tion of Russia or Japan affects the creative 

[19] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

imagination of America and the far isles of 
the sea. The most striking feature of mod- 
ern thought in politics, economics and soci- 
ology is that of a contemporaneous human- 
ity. And this world of ours is immeasur- 
ably more complex than any which Paul's 
knowledge and imagination compassed. All 
this creates new problems for the intellect, 
new ideals for the conscience, new tasks for 
the will. We need not wonder if men are 
still a little bewildered amid all these new 
ideas, ideals and achievements which are the 
boast of our generation. There has swept 
into our ken a vast world of human souls, 
a society of persons, minds, moral personal- 
ities variously equipped and variously handi- 
capped. Can we say, then, that the indis- 
pensable measure of all things is still the 
mind of Christ? If we can, then this new 
world of ours, these new discoveries and 
developments in science and art and thought 
and life become true sacraments of the soul 
of man; if we cannot say it, then they but 
serve to throw into relief the "splendid 
desolation" in which we live. 

My own conviction is that the statement 
of St. Paul is still valid for the serious 

[20] 



CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 

thinker of today. From the historical Jesus 
we are two thousand years away, and yet 
we can say, with a marvellous fullness of 
meaning, "But we have the mind of Christ." 
If we are walking in the light, if we are 
serious, if we really know what we are about, 
we may discern the mind of Christ cease- 
lessly at work within the minds of men. 
The supreme place we assign to goodness, 
the moralization of our social and civic insti- 
tutions, the deepening significance of the 
function of conscience in political life, the 
progressive triumph of international co-op- 
eration, the universal appreciation of the 
great moral personality, the increasing sense 
of the value of personalities not great — all 
these are the direct outcome of the impact 
of the mind of Christ upon the human mind. 
As a great thinker of our time puts it: 
"Christ is the creator of our human world. 
We are born into his world; we wake and 
sleep, work and rest, rejoice and weep, live 
and die in it." And this awareness of the 
mind of Christ as the norm of religious 
thought, the inspiration of religious feeling, 
the ideal and dynamic for religious charac- 
ter, and the intellectual fount from which 

[21] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

the ultimate philosophy of the world must 
arise, will become ever more and more dis- 
tinct and commanding as the years pass. 

IV 

But now, it is possible that you may 
acknowledge the transcendental value of the 
mind of Christ in "the great spiritual pio- 
neers of the race," whose conscience was 
supremely sensitive to the direct influence 
of the Divine ; but, you ask, can we have the 
mind of Christ? If we cannot, then there 
is no Gospel to preach ; for the reproduction 
in living men of the spiritual distinction of 
Jesus is surely of the essence of the Gospel. 
"Lo," said Jesus once to his disciples, "I 
am with you always, even to the end of the 
ages." And the supreme and permanent 
work of the Holy Spirit is just this work 
of awakening in men the realization of 
Christ's presence in the world, and of inter- 
preting the mind of Christ through the mind 
of the lover of Christ. The mind of Christ 
in the minds of Christians is the eternal wit- 
ness of his continuous presence in human 
society. It is scarcely necessary to remind 
you that the mind of Christ must always 

[22] 



CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 

transcend any particular manifestation of it 
that we can ever know. But that we — poor, 
sinful, fragmentary men and women though 
we are— may possess the mind of Christ, and 
carry something of his vision and love into 
the world about us, I do most honestly be- 
lieve. To recover that vision and love, and 
to measure all things by them, is the modern 
task of the Christian community. 

How then is it gained? First of all, by 
the way of history. However imperfectly 
Jesus is known, however imperfectly he is 
understood, there is no longer any doubt 
of the historical value of the figure of 
Jesus preserved in the New Testament. 
The vagaries of Christian theology have 
arisen whenever the Jesus of history has 
been ignored or misunderstood. It may be 
objected that criticism has thrown consid- 
erable doubt on the authenticity of some of 
the sayings and deeds of Jesus. But what- 
ever criticism has done, or may do in the 
future with particular sayings of Jesus, 
there is an impression of his teaching and 
a manifestation of his personality which 
remain independent of all criticism. And 
this is sufficient to reveal to the serious stu- 

[23] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

dent what manner of being Jesus was, what 
principles underlay his teaching, what ideals 
actuated his life, what vision of God and 
man dwelt within him. This assurance of 
the adequacy of the portrait of Jesus in the 
Gospels is increased when we note the sur- 
prising fact that in the rest of the New 
Testament particular sayings of Jesus are 
rarely quoted, they have given place to an 
interpretation of the mind of Christ, to a 
consciousness of actually possessing that 
mind. It is not this or that saying, this or 
that deed, but the whole character and spirit 
of Christ that is the central thing in the early 
Church, — that, and the profound conviction 
of living under the direct inspiration of the 
Living Lord. 

Then comes the way of appropriation. 
As we behold the mind of Christ progres- 
sively realized in the growing consciousness 
of the Church we come at last to see how 
it may be ours. We hear Jesus say: "My 
meat is to do the will of him that sent me. 
I do always the things that are pleasing to 
him." We hear Paul declare: "I was not 
disobedient to the heavenly vision." This 
self-surrender and obedience is the path to 

[24] 



CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS 

all inspiration and wisdom. In the great 
phrase of St. Paul, "Christ," as he is medi- 
ated to us through the pages of the New 
Testament, through the history of Christen- 
dom, and through the spiritual needs and 
crises of our own souls, "is made unto us 
wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and 
redemption." Thus we learn to govern our 
thinking by the classic experience of the 
past and by communion with the mind of 
Christ present with us. 

Learn to know Jesus for yourselves, 
study the record of his life, his words and 
deeds; study the effect of his spirit as it 
may be discerned working in the greatest 
minds and movements in subsequent his- 
tory; then bring all your problems of 
thought and conduct into the light of the 
resultant vision of the mind of Christ. It 
will master your mind, illuminate your des- 
tiny, enkindle your emotion and nerve your 
will. 

In the mind of Christ are gathered up and 
expressed all those "august anticipations, 
symbols, types" of God written in history 
and the human conscience, all those secret 
intimations of the spiritual greatness of 

[25] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

man, as actually sharing in the Divine Na- 
ture — anticipations and intimations which, 
however vague and shadowy they may ordi- 
narily be, 

"Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
Are yet the master light of all our seeing." 

It is the light which, as John Woolman said, 
is "deep and inward, confined to no forms 
of religion nor excluded from any when the 
heart stands in perfect sincerity." Let this 
mind, then, be in you which was also in 
Christ Jesus; for it blends into one the 
passion for truth, the passion for humanity, 
and the passion for God. 



[26] 



II 

THE MASTER LIGHT AND 
THE BIBLE 



"Jesus therefore said to those Jews that had believed 
him, If ye abide in my word, then are ye truly my disciples, 
and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you 
free." St. John 8:31-83. 



"But we have the mind of Christ." 1 Cor. 2:16. 

"Men have been trained in the belief that the holiest 
elements of our creed, nay the assurance of the existence 
and love of God Himself, are bound up with the literal 
acceptance of the whole Bible, of which the Old Testament 
forms by much the greater part; so that whenever their 
minds awoke to the irreconcilable discrepancies of the Old 
Testament text, or their consciences to the narrow and 
violent temper of its customs, and they could no longer 
believe in it, as the equal and consistent message of God 
to men, their whole faith in Him, suspended from their 
earliest years upon this impossible view of it, was in dan- 
ger of failing them, and in innumerable cases did fail them 
for the rest of their lives." G. A Smith, "Modern Criti- 
cism and the Preaching of the Old Testament" p. 26. 

"Criticism in the hands of Christian scholars does not 
banish or destroy the inspiration of the Old Testament; 
it presupposes it; it seeks only to determine the conditions 
under which it manifests itself; and it thus helps us to 
frame truer conceptions of the methods which it has pleased 
God to employ in revealing Himself to His ancient people 
of Israel, and in preparing the way for the fuller mani- 
festation of Himself in Christ Jesus." S. R. Driver, "In- 
troduction to tlie Literature of the Old Testament" p. xiii. 

"To sec with the eyes of Christ, to call that good which 
God calls good, to rule out that which the Christian truth 
rules out, — this is the highest work and privilege of God's 
children." W. N. Clarke, "The Use of the Scriptures in 
Theology/' p. 72. 



CHAPTER II 

THE MASTER LIGHT AND 
THE BIBLE 

In our consideration of the principle that 
man at his best is the measure of all things, 
we found that if we are indebted to Greek 
philosophy for the idea, we are strictly 
indebted to the Christian religion for the 
ideal. We tried to trace certain of the steps 
by which Paul came to apprehend the mind 
of Christ as the possession of the Christian 
community, and as the norm of truth, the 
standard of judgment. We further de- 
clared our belief that it is the business and 
the high privilege of the Church of today 
to recover the triumphant assurance of Paul 
and face the problems of our day with the 
mind of Christ as the creative principle of 
our interpretation. 

But now two things need to be said before 
proceeding to apply and further interpret 
our principle. It may be objected that, in 

[29] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

its last analysis, this means pure intuitional- 
ism. But that is not true. It is simply a 
plea for the recognition of the worth of the 
Christian consciousness in the world. It is 
the assertion that Jesus knew what he was 
about when he said: "Ye shall know the 
truth, and the truth shall make you free:" 
and that he covered in meaning the whole 
realm of truth when he said further: "But 
the Paraclete, even the Holy Spirit, whom 
the Father will send in my name, he shall 
teach you all things." What it is necessary 
to be sure about is that truth did come with 
Jesus Christ, that in this truth we all may 
share if with sincerity and humility we seek 
for it, and that with the vital consciousness 
of the mind of Christ informing our minds 
we possess a fruitful working principle by 
which we may test the conflicting minds and 
theories of our own times. 

The second thing of which we ought to 
be sure is that this principle is not a new 
and untried thing. It is as old as the Chris- 
tian religion itself. If it were first put into 
a phrase by Paul, it has been at the heart 
of every advance in thought and insight, of 
every reformation in religion and morals 

[30] 



MASTER LIGHT AND THE BIBLE 

for two thousand years. It is the very prin- 
ciple which you yourselves, consciously or 
unconsciously, employ in your common 
judgments of another's teaching or an- 
other's conduct. When you say this idea 
is unchristian, this conduct is unchristian, 
what test are you applying but that of the 
mind of Christ, or what you have come to 
believe is the mind of Christ? When you 
decide that a certain course of action winch 
you propose to follow is Christian, how have 
you reached that decision? Have you not 
reached it by the application of a fine con- 
science created in you by contact with the 
same mind in history, in the Christian 
thought of your own day, and in your own 
soul? My only contention is that we have 
not carried the principle deep enough. We 
have not ventured to apply it with the width 
of spiritual vision, the fearlessness of spirit- 
ual action, and the perfect assurance of 
its efficiency which were the characteristic 
marks of primitive Christianity. The con- 
viction, in the energy of which this little 
book is being written, is that when we accept 
this principle thoroughly it will go far, very 
far indeed, to cure the intellectual restless- 

[31] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

ness, moral perplexity and spiritual dis- 
couragement which are the prevailing notes 
of our day. 

I 
We are now ready to ask: What is the 
significance of the mind of Christ for our 
modern problems? The first of these is the 
Bible. It comes first in our discussion, not 
simply because of its own unique interest, 
but also because it is at the present moment 
a greater problem to thousands of conscien- 
tious men and women than any other. Yet, 
less than a century ago, the Bible to almost 
everybody in the Church at least presented 
no problem at all. It was, from Genesis 
to Revelation, the Word of God, an infal- 
lible book, supernaturally inspired, super- 
naturally preserved from interpolations, and 
supernaturally translated. The different 
men who wrote or compiled its different 
books were not human in any recognizable 
sense. They were instruments, passive re- 
corders, even mere "pens" in the hands of 
the Holy Ghost. The science of history as 
we know it was as yet unborn, and no ac- 
count was taken of the progress of thought 
and morals in the years that passed between 

[32] 



MASTER LIGHT AND THE BIBLE 

the oldest and the newest writings in the 
Bible. A text from the Book of Judges, 
or Esther, or the Song of Songs, or Eccle- 
siastes was just as authentic and valuable 
for the establishing of any doctrine, as one 
taken from the Gospels or the Epistles. 
The proof -text method, indeed, was supreme 
in theological thought, while the position 
and the quality of the text were of no special 
moment. Literary criticism — the kind that 
is at once imaginative and constructive, 
interpretative and historical — was scarcely 
out of its swaddling clothes. Little dis- 
tinction was observed between the poetry of 
the Bible and its prose, between history and 
prophecy, between narrative and comment, 
between apocalypse and epistle. Indeed, 
the particular literary medium, as itself an 
important instrument of interpretation, had 
not yet been entertained by the general mind. 
One hundred years ago, every book in the 
Bible was accepted as practically the work 
of the writer whose name it bore in its title, 
or that appeared in the first few sentences. 
Every statement, whether of men or gods, 
of event or thought, was taken at its face 
value. All that a man had to do was to 

[83] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

take the Bible just as it stood, as the truth, 
the whole truth and nothing but the truth; 
and thus of equal value throughout. What- 
ever other ideas came to him in the course 
of his secular studies must be made to 
square with the statements, or the received 
interpretation of the statements, contained 
in the Bible. To the Protestant of a hun- 
dred years ago the Bible, the whole Bible, 
was the measure of all things. In other 
words, there was no problem of the Bible. 
It was itself the solver of all problems. 
Even less than fifty years ago, save in the 
minds of a -few brave scholars whose voices 
the Church scarcely heard, there was no 
problem. And it is certain that there are 
multitudes in the Church of Christ today 
to whom the Bible presents no problem of 
any sort. It came to them as a sacred tra- 
dition and they have never questioned the 
validity of their inheritance. 

But the last fifty or seventy-five years 
have been years of tremendous upheaval in 
every department of human thought and 
knowledge. Nothing is now as once it 
seemed. Knowledge has increased more 
and more; new sciences have been created, 

[84] 



MASTER LIGHT AND THE BIBLE 

and old sciences made new; empires long 
forgotten, and literatures long lost have 
been flashed before our wondering eyes ; the 
whole world of man has been reconstructed, 
or is in the process of reconstruction; and, 
what is of more importance still, our whole 
way of approach to history and literature 
and nature has undergone a radical and 
vital change. What is called the "scientific 
method" has invaded every province of 
learning. It is this new world into which 
we have come, and this new method we have 
won that have created for us the problem 
of the Bible. 

II 
Now there are two classes of persons to 
whom the Bible has become a serious prob- 
lem. There is first of all the vast multitude 
of our young men and women upon whom 
have come the ends of the age. It must not 
be forgotten that much of that which I have 
so inadequately outlined is in the possession 
of, not only the mature man and woman, 
but our older children also. Vast domains 
of knowledge are being daily brought within 
the grasp of their understanding. New 
methods of study obtain, and the very at- 

[35] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

mosphere of the modern classroom is some- 
thing so utterly different from what we were 
accustomed to in our school-days, that it is 
not an exaggeration to say that modern 
education is a new thing. Subjects are 
taught in the High School, for instance, 
which had no place in our curriculum. Of 
these subjects, three especially have a most 
important bearing upon any conception of 
the Bible. They are natural science, com- 
parative literature and history. I include 
history because as it is taught today it is 
really a new branch of learning. Indeed, 
all these subjects are taught with a wealth 
of knowledge, a respect for reality, and a 
freedom of presentation that were utterly 
lacking a generation ago. Thus even among 
our children the scientific, literary and his- 
torical spirit is more or less keenty appre- 
hended as the modern atmosphere through 
which things, events and theories are seen 
and judged. For five days in the week they 
study under teachers wiio are well versed 
in their special departments, natural sci- 
ence, history, physical geography, Greek 
and Latin. They are not only being in- 
structed, they are being educated; they are 

[36] 



MASTER LIGHT AND THE BIBLE 

encouraged to ask questions and to search 
for answers. And when they open their 
Bibles in the Sunday-school, the question- 
ing spirit comes with them, though it may 
not, alas, always find expression. But at 
the back of their young minds some such 
questions as these are present: Is this real 
history that I am reading? Are there not 
different accounts of the same events to 
which different motives are attached? Are 
not many of the stories here of pre- 
cisely the same nature as those in my 
Latin and Greek Readers which I have 
learned are myths and legends? How far 
does the Book of Genesis agree with my 
science books? More of our children are 
asking these and other questions like them 
than we imagine; and thus the Bible be- 
comes a problem to them. 

Now, what are you going to do about it? 
You may close your own minds to such dif- 
ficulties without, perhaps, much harm com- 
ing to you; but it is morally certain that 
you cannot, without irreparable loss, close 
your children's minds. Nothing can pre- 
vent them asking these questions concerning 
the contents and character and meaning of 

[3T] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

the Bible. And they must be answered; 
they must be answered frankly in the light 
of the best available knowledge; and they 
must be answered by you, or by some one 
whose Christian character and general 
knowledge are a guarantee of integrity, I 
can scarcely emphasize this too strongly; 
for it is a matter of common observation 
that not knowledge, but the way knowledge 
is presented to the mind, is of the utmost 
importance. I can, for example, tell my 
children that the account of creation in the 
Book of Genesis is a great prose poem. 
Now, I could say that with a sneer which 
would degrade the whole Bible in their 
minds for ever. Or, I could say it in a way 
that would elevate the very idea of a prose 
poem into a vehicle for the transmission of 
profound eternal truth. Which method 
shall I employ if, in these difficult and tran- 
sitional days, I desire to preserve the rev- 
erence of my children for the Bible? One 
of the most pressing duties before us as 
parents and friends of the young, is that we 
must see to it that we do not ignore the 
human and progressive elements in the 
Bible, that we do not insist on its equal value 

[38] 



MASTER LIGHT AND THE BIBLE 

throughout, and that we do not treat rev- 
erent criticism of its documents as an enemy 
of religion. We must demand frankness 
and honesty, as well as reverence and devo- 
tion, both in the pulpit and in the Bible 
School, if we desire to see our children ear- 
nest and intelligent members of the Church 
when they become men and women. For 
to them, and especially to the most intelli- 
gent of them, the Bible has already become 
a problem ; and we can no more safely evade 
the questions which pass legitimately from 
the Day School and the University to the 
Sunday School and the Church, than we can 
safely evade the natural laws under which 
we live. 

Then there is a second class to whom the 
Bible has become a problem. I mean those 
men and women who have been brought up 
in the traditional view of it, but who have 
become aware that there is another view 
which is now being taught in every compe- 
tent theological seminary in the land; and 
they are puzzled, sometimes even pro- 
foundly hurt by what they think is a des- 
ecration of the Word of God, an unwar- 
ranted violation of a Divine Book. They 

[39] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

are, it may be, not scholars themselves, yet 
the work of scholars is now open to them. 
Through all kinds of mediums the results 
of historical, literary and textual study of 
the Bible are now plainly put before their 
minds. They have either read or heard it 
stated that the Pentateuch was not written 
by Moses, but is a compilation many times 
edited of several distinct documents; that 
few, if any, of the Psalms were written by 
David; that nobody knows who wrote Ec- 
clesiastes, the Song of Songs and Proverbs; 
that there were two Zechariahs and several 
Isaiahs; that the Book of Jonah is not his- 
tory; that Paul did not write the Epistle 
to the Hebrews, nor Peter the second Epis- 
tle bearing his name, and so forth. 

Now there is no doubt whatever that the 
published findings of what is called "Higher 
Criticism" are simply bewildering to the 
average person who has been taught to 
believe in a dead level of Biblical inspira- 
tion, and who can discern no vital difference 
between the mind of Christ and the mind 
of a Hebrew law-maker, or between the 
mind of a great poet-prophet and the mind 
of a ritualistic priest. And aside altogether 

[40] 



MASTER LIGHT AND THE BIBLE 

from the lack of spiritual discernment which 
this confusion reveals, I think the perplex- 
ity springs out of a fatal misunderstanding 
of the real significance of the Bible in the 
first place, and of the work of scholars in 
the second place. 

Let me remind you again, then, that the 
Bible has a literary history. It was pro- 
duced by different men, at different times, 
and under differing conditions. It has been 
edited and re-edited many times, and has 
suffered many things at the hands of trans- 
lators and interpreters. As such a collec- 
tion of documents, it belongs to the histor- 
ical and literary scholars as much as Homer 
and Virgil, Dante and Shakspere belong 
to them. It is the stupendous and neces- 
sary work of the scholar to get behind the 
crude mass of received opinions, and to come 
as near as possible to "the actual historic 
processes" by which the Bible has come to 
be just what it now is. He endeavors to 
discover the age in which the various books 
were written, the men who wrote them, the 
circumstances out of which they sprang, and 
the relation which they bear to one another 
and to the larger history of mankind. But 

[41] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

none of these questions primarily concerns 
faith at all. They are questions of scholar- 
ship, and can only be settled by scholars. 
They can never be settled by faith; they 
are dependent wholly upon facts. 

Ill 

But the Bible has not only a literary his- 
tory, it has a moral and spiritual history. 
And here it passes out of the hands of the 
historian and the critic into the heart of 
humanity. To measure the historical and 
literary value of the Bible is one thing, to 
measure its moral and spiritual worth is 
another and a very different thing. This 
is what w r e are apt to forget. The books 
of the Bible are just what they are, who- 
ever wrote them, and whenever they were 
written. They are here, and their moral 
quality is here also. While noble men are 
engaged upon the history in the Bible, and 
the literary forms in which that history is 
embedded, and are minutely deciphering 
tablets and monuments that shed light upon 
it, its moral and spiritual force continues. 
The work of the scholar is not yet finished ; 
it will not be completed in our day. But 

[42] 



MASTER LIGHT AND THE BIBLE 

suppose it were all done, suppose we knew 
the exact sources of the histories, the pro- 
phetic books, the poems and the wisdom 
literature of the Old Testament, and sup- 
pose we knew the sources of the Gospels 
and the Acts, and who wrote the Epistle 
to the Hebrews and the Pastoral letters — 
suppose we knew all this with absolute final 
knowledge, the real problem of the Bible 
would still remain. What is it worth to us? 
How are we to discover its worth? Here 
are two questions outside the realm of mere 
scholarship. They are questions which are 
of the deepest concern to everyone of us. 
And they require a different test than that 
which the tools of the scholar supply. 

It would seem that we have here reached 
the question of the Inspiration of the Scrip- 
tures. But the term itself has been so soiled 
by ignoble strife and infelicitous exposition 
that I think we should do better service to 
mankind if we let the doctrine rest awhile, 
and directed our strength of intellect and 
heart on the quality, the value and the 
power inherent in the Scriptures themselves. 
You may be sure of this, that if the Bible 
does not impress you with its own transcend- 

[43] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

ent spiritual and moral worth, no bare asser- 
tion — whether within its pages or without — 
that its author is God, could be of any per- 
manent value to you. The inspiration of 
the Bible is not proved by assertion, how- 
ever emphatic, but by simple experience. 
It is demonstrated when a man in the throes 
of a great temptation goes to the Bible and 
finds therein the word of power which de- 
livers him; or when a woman crushed 
beneath a great sorrow hears such a word 
as this and believes it — "I will not leave you 
desolate: I will come unto you. Let not 
your heart be troubled" — and goes out into 
the world again with uplifted spirit con- 
scious that her Lord walks with her in the 
way; or when a thinker burdened with 
modern problems of evil which seem insol- 
uble pores over its pages till there flashes 
into his mind, there to stay forever, the 
tremendous conviction of the moral order 
of the world, that back of all the noise and 
fury of man's inhumanity to man 

"Standeth God within the shadow 
Keeping watch upon His own," 

and that within the historic process of the 

[U] 



MASTER LIGHT AND THE BIBLE 

world may be clearly seen a vast redemptive 
process whose final significance can be read 
in the light of the mind of Christ, This is 
how the Bible vindicates its right to the 
supreme place in the life of humanity which 
it has attained as the word of the Father 
to his child. "The Bible holds its place in 
literature," said Emerson, "not to miracles, 
but to the fact that it comes from a pro- 
founder depth of life than any other book." 
I know no other proof of inspiration which 
can be put in the same category with that 
which is to be found in the glorious history 
of the Bible as the inspirer of men and 
nations. 

But I am not engaged here upon a eulogy 
of the Bible. In the light of its moral and 
spiritual history, eulogy seems almost an 
impertinence. But I am concerned that we 
should keep this aspect of the Bible abso- 
lutely distinct from either its historical or 
its literary aspect. To confuse them is to 
be guilty of a sad disservice to humanity. 
The worth of the Bible to you and me is 
not in its commas and colons, in the Jewish 
traditions as to its authorship, in its histor- 
ical accuracy or inaccuracy here or there, 

[45] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

but in its whole purpose and spirit, in its 
progressive revelation of the will of God 
to man which finds its culmination in the 
disclosure of the Person and the Mind of 
Christ. The true glory of the Bible can only 
be understood, its imperishable elements can 
only be revealed as the mind of Christ is 
deliberately borne through all its pages as 
the absolute judge of their worth for man- 
kind. We must bring to our study of his- 
tory and psalm, of story and prophecy, of 
epistle and vision the mind of the Master. 
The Bible holds its exalted place in the heart 
of the world because of the Supreme Per- 
son revealed in it. And it is only as we 
really see Christ in it that we shall grasp 
its imperishable worth to our world for all 
ages. 

And just here the work of the scholar has 
rendered inestimable service to the Bible 
where the Bible is deepest. At the heart 
of the Christian religion stands Jesus Christ, 
and next to him his greatest apostle, Paul. 
Our spiritual confidence in both these has 
been immeasurably deepened as the result 
of criticism. The historical character of 
Jesus, his personality and teachings, his 

[46] 



MASTER LIGHT AND THE BIBLE 

death and subsequent manifestations, his 
effect on his immediate followers ; the con- 
version of Paul, his missionary career, and 
the authenticity of his greatest letters — all 
this, and much more, is more credible today 
as the result of critical investigation than 
it was even twenty or thirty years ago. It 
is easier for us to discover what the mind 
of Christ is, how it became the principle of 
Paul's own life, the test by which he desired 
his own teachings to be judged; and how 
it became the principle to which every sub- 
sequent interpretation of religion was, soon 
or late, brought up for judgment. And 
with the mind of Christ as the criterion of 
moral truth, the humblest student of the 
Bible will gain new insights and a deeper 
sense of that progress in revelation which 
the work of the scholar has at last made 
plain to us. He will be independent of all 
external authority in his search for the high- 
est truth. He will know the truth, and the 
truth will make him free. If the final sig- 
nificance of the Old Testament is "its un- 
conscious anticipation of Christ," surely the 
final significance of the New Testament is 
the overwhelming consciousness we find 

[47] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

there of the immanence of the mind of 
Christ in his followers. John, and Paul, 
and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
daringly brought the whole prophetic and 
historical past of the race under the judg- 
ment of the mind of Christ. They were 
conscious of possessing an absolute measure 
of truth and righteousness. Christ had 
made them free, and in their freedom they 
were not afraid to examine and measure the 
revelation of God in past ages with the 
revelation of God vouchsafed to them in 
their immediate experience of Christ. And 
with the same freedom, in the same experi- 
ence, w r e can bring to bear upon their writ- 
ings the same criterion. For we have the 
mind of Christ, and Christ has made us 
free. We not only can do this, but it is our 
pressing duty to do it, for only so can we 
be loyal to the Christ whose manifestation 
of God is the supreme glory of the Bible, 
and whose living presence in history and in 
the mind of man is the supreme glory of 
life. 

Let me now sum up what I have been 
trying to say in this chapter. When men 
are perplexed by the Bible it is because they 

[48] 






MASTER LIGHT AND THE BIBLE 

have failed to judge it by the mind of Christ. 
How the Bible came to be just what it is — 
that is the work of the honest and competent 
scholar to discover. But what its nature is, 
as a self-disclosure of God to man, as the 
record of the progressive apprehensions of 
humanity concerning God — that is within 
the compass of every man and woman to 
know. And such knowledge is independent 
of critics — high or low — it is to be ascer- 
tained by the fearless, patient, sincere appli- 
cation of the mind of Christ, as manifested 
in history, in the experience of his immediate 
followers, and in the Christian consciousness 
of our own times, over the whole field of 
Biblical study. "Have this mind in you 
which was also in Christ Jesus," then "You 
shall know the truth, and the truth shall set 
you free." 



[49] 



Ill 

THE MASTER LIGHT AND THE 
UNIVERSE 



"For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for 
the revealing of the sons of God." Bom. 8: 19. 

"But we have the mind of Christ." 1 Cor. 2:16 

"Science and Religion are incommensurables, and there 
is no true antithesis between them — they belong to different 
universes of discourse. Science is descriptive and offers 
no ultimate explanation; Religion is mystical and inter- 
pretative, implying a realization of a higher order of things 
than those of sense-experience. . . . While Science can give 
no direct support to religious convictions, it establishes 
conclusions which the religious mood may utilize, just as 
philosophy utilizes them, and transfigure, just as poetry 
transfigures them." J. Arthur Thomson, "Introduction 
to Science;' pp. 224-225. 

"The whole movement of human history is nothing but 
the increasing comprehension of what nature and man are, 
when brought into connection with the principle immanent 
in all things. If at first man seems to live in a world that 
is foreign to him, it yet is true that the whole development 
of civilization is the process by which the rationality of the 
universe is ever more clearly disclosed to him, as he ob- 
tains an ever fuller knowledge of the Spirit in whom he 
lives and moves and has his being." John Watson, "The 
Philosophical Basis of Religion," p. 135. 

"Uniformity is not simply a law that we find in nature; 
neither is it a category of the human mind which we 
impose upon nature; it is a synthesis of the Mind within 
nature and the mind within ourselves. Nothing will account 
for the law of uniformity in nature except a divine Mind, 
a Logos, which precedes and underlies and permeates the 
very structure and process of creation, constituting the 
universe a cosmos and not a chaos." John W. Buckham, 
t( Christ and the Eternal Order," p. 88. 



CHAPTER III 

THE MASTER LIGHT AND THE 
UNIVERSE 

The second great problem of our day 
concerns itself with the universe. What is 
its meaning? How may we test the worth 
for life of any theory of the universe? First 
of all let me remind you that science has 
demonstrated that the universe is really a 
universe, not a multiverse. There is not one 
world for the scientist, another for the phi- 
losopher, another for the theologian, and 
still another for the common man. You and 
I live in precisely the same world which the 
teachers of our day inhabit and which they 
seek to explain. We are, indeed, indebted 
to the scientist for our knowledge of the 
facts and forces in Nature ; we are indebted 
to the philosopher and the theologian for 
the concepts through which these facts and 
forces may be seen and correlated; but to 
both facts and concepts it is not only our 
high privilege but our pressing duty to 

[53] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

bring some great principle of interpretation. 
The fact that we all live together in one 
universe surely demands that we seek to 
understand it; but it is not foolishly pre- 
sumed here that our understanding will ever 
be complete. The world of nature in which 
our lives is set is too complex, and reveals 
itself in too fragmentary a manner to permit 
us ever to say that we have encompassed all 
knowledge. "We know in part, and proph- 
ecy in part," but we believe that "when that 
which is perfect is come/' it will not con- 
tradict the part which has already come. It 
is the inspiring task of the investigator to 
decrease the realm of the unknown, and to 
bring to bear upon it, ever more and more, 
the light of the part that is known in the 
assurance that the universe which he seeks 
to describe is a single whole which can be 
rationally interpreted. As the French phi- 
losopher, Prof. E. Boutroux, says: "The 
history of science proves that we have a 
right to affirm a continuity between what we 
know and what we do not know." (Quoted 
by J. A. Thomson in his "Introduction to 
Science.") 

[54] 



THE UNIVERSE 

I 

It is when we come to ask for the mean- 
ing of the whole, what lies behind and within 
all things, that our problem arises. For 
here, modern thought, employing the dis- 
coveries of science, speaks with three voices. 
The first of these is the voice of agnosticism. 
It is perhaps the prevailing voice of science. 
The scientist does not say that nothing can 
be known of the ultimate meaning of things, 
but only that he does not know. The noble 
agnosticism of the man of science is of an- 
other order than that of the smart agnosti- 
cism of the man in the street. 

For the man of science we can have noth- 
ing but the profoundest respect, admiration 
and gratitude. He is a fellow-worker in 
the cause of truth with all lovers of the 
truth. And of all workers, the true scien- 
tist is our supreme type of modesty. He, 
more than any other man, recognizes the 
fragmentariness of his knowledge. He may 
declare, in the words of Tyndale which so 
startled our fathers, that he "finds in matter 
the promise and potency of all terrestrial 
life;" but he will add, "What matter is in 

[55] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

its essence no one knows, we can only know 
it from what it does." As a biologist he 
goes through the House of Life with scalpel 
and microscope and test-tube, and makes the 
wonderful discovery that every living being, 
from the simplest to the most complex, 
arises from a little cell of living substance 
which he calls protoplasm; but he is not 
afraid to say that no one knows why of two 
cells, between which no microscope and no 
laboratory test can detect the smallest dif- 
ference, one can develop only to a jellyfish, 
and the other only to a human being. As 
a psychologist he may say, "We know that 
all the thoughts we think, and all the emo- 
tions we feel, involve a physical process;" 
but he adds, "the gulf between consciousness 
and the movements of nerve matter is im- 
passable." He may regard the universe as 
"the manifestation of one vast energy for 
ever changing its form and progressing in 
its manifestations;" but he refuses to name 
this force, resting content with the assertion 
that it is the same "as that which in ourselves 
wells up in the form of consciousness." For 
all such attitudes as these we can have, I 
say, only feelings of respect. They are the 

[56] 



THE UNIVERSE 

recognition of the limitations of science 
before the problem of the universe. 

But the second voice of modern thought, 
employing the language of science, recog- 
nizes no limitations. It declares that the 
universe has already given up its secret, 
that all is known; and it regards the ulti- 
mate reality as physical force, or energy. 
To it the universe is all dumb blind matter 
in process of unconscious evolution. It de- 
clares that the force which forms our uni- 
verse, and rises to rational, moral and spirit- 
ual life in man, and to Divine consciousness 
in Jesus, is nothing more than physical 
energy playing with molecules of matter. 
It should be said at once that this is not the 
voice of science as science, but rather the 
voice of a philosophy built upon some of 
the results, and using the nomenclature of 
science. It begins where strict science ends. 
If the scientist says that mechanism rules 
in the inorganic world, the philosophic ma- 
terialist declares that it rules also in the 
organic world, and in the world of mind. 
From this point of view the whole inner 
world of man is a pathetic illusion; and 
Nature is but a convenient name for a mind- 

[57] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

less, conscienceless, heartless conflict of me- 
chanical or brutal forces; and the cosmos 
itself is nothing but a theatre of a vast ine- 
luctable tragedy which dogs the steps of 
beast and man alike. 

The effect of this view upon the human 
mind is a horrible pessimism, the banishment 
of any faith in ideals, of trust in any Divine 
Helper, and of hope in any persistence of 
personality beyond the grave. There can be 
no room, and therefore no aspiration for 
independent spiritual forces and values 
where the life of the mind itself is accepted 
as a mere by-product of physical mechanism. 

But this thorough-going mechanical con- 
ception of the universe, which blossomed 
out in the eighteenth century into a material- 
istic philosophy, has now little standing 
among men of science, or among men of 
highest education anywhere. It is, however, 
the misfortune of our times that it still 
exists in cheap reprints of discredited books 
which are eagerly devoured by the half- 
educated and impressionable masses. Let 
me assert again, then, that materialism is 
not a scientific conclusion. There is no sci- 
entist writing today who is more thoroughly 

[58] 



THE UNIVERSE 

equipped for his task, or has more fine 
moments of insight, than Prof. J. A. Thom- 
son of Aberdeen. He tells us that we have 
no warrant for asserting that the physical 
conceptions of matter and energy, ab- 
stracted off for scientific purposes, exhaust 
the reality of nature. The life of the organ- 
ism not only implies a succession of chem- 
ical and physical forces. It also implies "a 
co-ordination, a purposiveness, an individ- 
uality, a creative agency, a power of trading 
with time, a history — in all of which it tran- 
scends mechanism." And with the fall of 
the mechanistic theory of the universe, the 
materialistic philosophy built upon it, falls 
also. 

Once more, in a frank and exceedingly 
able book on "Evolution," written in col- 
laboration with his friend Patrick Geddes, 
Prof. Thomson speaks of the refusal of the 
secret of life to be formulated, of how re- 
peatedly that secret slips past the biologist, 
and then he says: "Yet though intelligence 
fails, do we not at times come nearer to it 
through sympathy? Wordsworth, Emer- 
son, Meredith, these and many other Na- 
ture-poets are perhaps the truest, because 

[59] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

the deepest, biologists of us all." This frank 
acknowledgment that the secret of life 
eludes the microscope and the test-tube, and 
is to be approached rather through the 
exalted insight of the poet, is the justifica- 
tion — if justification be needed — of the con- 
structive imagination which seeks to ad- 
vance beyond the last outpost of science, 
in its endeavor to elucidate the problem of 
the universe. 

It is to this I am now come. For modern 
thought, still gratefully employing the re- 
sults of science, speaks with a third voice 
which, year by year being heard with greater 
distinctness and power, is now beginning to 
command the keenest intellects of our time. 
With the scientist it admits that "matter" 
is known only through what it does, but 
declares that it makes itself known to us, 
not only as the substance of that which we 
call the material world, but also as the me- 
dium of life and thought, the instrument 
and expression of spirit. It regards the 
universe, with science, as a manifestation 
of one vast energy, but declares that we 
cannot think of this energy as something 
less than what it shows itself to be in us — 

[60] 






THE UNIVERSE 

mind, will, spirit; rational and moral. In 
those beautiful lines of Wordsworth which 
have surely endeared themselves to all lov- 
ers of poetry, it says : 

"For I have learned 
To look on nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing of ten-times 
The still, sad music of humanity, 
Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things/' 

Or, in the stricter language of science itself, 
it declares with John Fiske, in his "Idea of 
God," "The universe is not a machine, but 
an organism, with an indwelling principle 
of life. It was not made, but has grown. 
. . . We see all things working together 
through countless ages of toil and trouble, 
toward one glorious consummation." It be- 
holds the whole creation, as St. Paul beheld 

[61] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

it, groaning and travailing together, wait- 
ing for the revealing of the sons of God. 
It sees Nature leaning ever toward mind, 
seeking ever to express spirit ; the evolution 
of the world, through countless retrogres- 
sions and obstacles, ever a movement toward 
a spiritual goal, — first that which is inor- 
ganic, then that which is organic, and then 
that which is rational, "love, and man's 
unconquerable mind," not only as the last 
term of the evolution of things, but as tran- 
scending things, as becoming the judge, the 
measure of things. 



II 

The plain fact is that the materialistic 
view of the universe has arisen through the 
monumental mistake of interpreting man's 
total environment by its lowest terms in- 
stead of by its highest. The question of 
the meaning of the universe and the pur- 
pose of life can be settled neither by an 
appeal to the mechanics of existence, nor 
to that Nature which is "red in tooth and 
claw with ravine." It is a principle of mod- 
ern criticism in art and literature and music 

[62] 



THE UNIVERSE 

that a man's total achievement should be 
appraised in the light of his highest and 
best work. The critic who habitually fails 
to do this is ruled out of the kingdom of 
letters with contempt. Now, it is this prin- 
ciple of interpretation which we must carry 
into life, and bring to bear upon the problem 
of the universe. At the head of the mighty 
movement and procession of Nature stands 
her highest achievement— Man. As a great 
biologist puts it, "we feel sure that organ- 
isms reveal a deeper aspect of reality than 
crystals do, and that in this sense there is 
more in the plant than in the crystal, more 
in the animal than the plant, more in the 
bird than in the worm, more in man than 
in them all." And this vast world of things 
and forces is man's home which he has a 
right to interpret by the highest he discov- 
ers in himself. In our childhood days we 
were taught to sing 

"I'm but a stranger here, 
Heaven is my home. 
Earth is a desert drear, 
Heaven is my home." 

We sing that hymn no more; at least the 
most intelligent of us. Science has made 

[63] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

it forever impossible as the expression of 
man's place in the universe. Man stands 
here, as biology has indisputably proven, 
not as a stranger, not as an alien, but as 
the legitimate "child of the world's life." 
Man is here, and in his Father's house. He 
is here with his intellect, his power of look- 
ing before and after; he is here in fellow- 
ship as a social being; he is here with his 
conscience, his awareness of obligation, and 
his profound misgiving and distress when 
he fails to fulfil his obligation; he is here 
with his reverence, his love, his instinct for 
worship, his sense of the supreme value of 
ideals and of the necessity laid upon him 
to incarnate those ideals. And all this must 
enter into any measurement of the meaning 
of the other facts and principles which sci- 
ence has made clear to us, and of their place 
in a universe of reality. For "no view of 
the world can for a moment be treated as 
worthy of consideration that offers no ex- 
planation of the highest product of evolu- 
tion, the intellectual, social, moral and 
religious life of man." * 

*G. R. Dodson. "The Synoptic Mind," Harvard 
Theological Review, January, 1911. 

[64] 



THE UNIVERSE 

But here again we have to ask: What 
man is the measure of all things? Are we 
to judge the universe by the brutalities, con- 
fusions, suspicions, fears and appetites of 
its meaner souls? or are we to judge it 
by the ideals, aspirations, faiths, wisdom, 
achievements and fellowships in love and 
hope of its finer souls? Surely there can be 
but one answer. The perfect man must be 
the perfect measure of all things. We have 
seen that the highest product of the universe 
is man, and the Christian position is that 
man came to his highest and best in the Man 
Christ Jesus. To our world, it is Jesus 
who is "the concrete universal, the beautiful 
life — not only individually beautiful and 
complete, as a work of art, but the greatest 
energizing power for beauty, truth and 
goodness." And we have the mind of 
Christ. The monumental fact remains that, 
in spite of what has been fiercely called the 
"dissolution of dogmas and the crash of 
creeds," the supremacy of Jesus in the 
world of human souls is indisputable; and 
the forces which he revealed and embodied 
in his life did not pass away with his 
death. They have become ever more and 

[65] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

more the conquering forces in the life of 
mankind. 

We simply cannot face the question of 
the ultimate worth or worthlessness of the 
universe without asking: What did Jesus 
think about it? What did he think the per- 
fect ends of life were? What he did with 
his own life is open to any man to read. 
He did not lose it amid the harsh conditions 
and lowly circumstances of a mechanic's 
occupation. We may be sure, though of 
this we have no record, that he glorified 
labor by the spirit which he brought to it. 
When he emerged from the carpenter's shop 
it was with the clearest of convictions that 
the greatest fact in his world was the fact 
of his soul, and with a profound sense of its 
infinite worth as the measure of things. He 
knew the loneliness of the wilderness, the 
brutality of nature and of man, and the 
spectres that face all great thinkers on the 
problem of life; he knew the forces which 
make against truth and goodness : the whole 
tragedy and sin of human life was an open 
book to him. Yes, he knew all these things. 
It seems sometimes as if they poured the 
full strength of their poisonous waters upon 

[66] 



THE UNIVERSE 

him. What, then, was his attitude toward 
these stern and relentless foes of optimism? 
It was an attitude of conquering tranquillity. 
In the wilderness he fought them and over- 
came them; in the busy marts of men he 
fought and overcame them. Undismayed, 
the Son of Man went about doing good, — 
doing good and discovering good. In the 
vicious, in the outcasts of society, in the men 
and women defeated in the struggle for life 
he discovered a moral worth which neither 
they nor the world about them had sus- 
pected; and he taught them to realize their 
worth for God, to achieve character, and to 
live in right personal relations with one 
another. 

"And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
With human hands the creed of creeds 
In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought/' 

"He took his life," as Dr. Gordon so finely 
puts it, "with its superlative wisdom and 
goodness, from his baptism to his cruci- 
fixion, and gave it in one continuous sacri- 
fice in attestation of his sense of the worth 
of the human soul." 

[67] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

Now it is to the sanity and universality 
of the teaching of Jesus; to his habitual 
attitude toward nature and man — his de- 
light in the one, and his sacrificial sympathy 
with the other; — to his glorious service to 
his own generation ; to his undisturbed sense 
of filial communion with God; to his 
consciousness of a unique vocation as the 
world's Redeemer; and to his absolute loy- 
alty to that vocation — it is to all this that 
the problem of the universe comes up for 
judgment. For these things did not perish 
upon Calvary, they are constituent elements 
and forces in the world's life. And once 
we bring the problem of the universe to the 
test of the mind of Christ, then life and all 
its issues gather new meaning. What are 
the perfect ends of life according to Jesus? 
For the Mind there is truth, the absolute 
harmony between thought and reality: "Ye 
shall know the truth, and the truth shall 
make you free." For the Will there is 
goodness, the serious task of bringing into 
accord the ideal and the achievement in 
character, the harmony between what is and 
what ought to be: "Ye therefore shall be 
perfect as your Father in Heaven is per- 

[68] 






THE UNIVERSE 

feet." And for the Heart there is love, the 
supreme self -giving in which man's life is 
brought into harmony with the life of God : 
"Love your enemies, pray for them that 
persecute you, that we may be sons of your 
Father which is in Heaven." It is in the 
light of these eternal and inspiring ends that 
the meaning of the universe is to be sought. 
The sane advice of Dr. G. R. Dodson is 
in order here: "Put together the two things 
that belong together, man and the universe, 
and then ask what kind of a universe is it 
that is flowering out into a human world 
of thought and love and righteousness, of 
joy and peace and hope." Yes, if you will 
do this in fellowship with, and under the 
eternal guidance of the mind of Christ, it 
will be impossible for you to believe your- 
self a beast and the universe a meaningless 
mechanism. The mind of Christ has been 
long at work upon the minds of men, and 
the criticism to which the exigencies of life 
have subjected it for two thousand years 
has only made it more clear and precious. 
And the great word for this age is that the 
ideas and ideals of Jesus are at home in 
the universe, for Jesus also was the legiti- 

[69] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

mate child of the world's life. He was no 
stranger here, no alien, no transient visitor ; 
he was the Son of Man, bone of our bone, 
flesh of our flesh, spirit of our spirit. And 
the ideals of Jesus are reproducible in us 
because they are realities in the moral uni- 
verse of man, and in the being of God "in 
whom we live and move and have our 
being." 

Man is not here, then, as an empty boat 
tossed about by the waves of a lawless sea. 
He is here as a strong swimmer battling 
with the waves, aware that there is a shore, 
and of his strength to reach it, and using 
the very forces of the sea to bear him thither. 
A materialistic philosophy is possible only 
when one thinks of man and the universe 
under the symbol of the boat at the mercy 
of the waves. But when one thinks of man 
as a conscious swimmer glorying in his skill, 
he becomes aware of Mind, of Will, of Pur- 
posiveness in the universe. And when from 
the swimmer we lift our eyes to that gra- 
cious and Supreme Person who declared 
that he had overcome the world, and when 
we witness the progressive realization in 
human history of the forces which he re- 

[70] 



THE UNIVERSE 

vealed as controlling his life, then we are 
able to conclude that at the heart of our 
universe is a Mind, Will, Spirit, which must 
be equal to its highest product — the mind 
of Christ. 



1 71 j 



IV 

THE MASTER LIGHT AND THE 
BEING OF GOD 



"Oh that I knew where I might find him! 
That I might come even to his seat." Job 23: 3. 

"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." St. John 
14:9. 

"In him we live and move and have our being." Acts 

17:28. 

"The religious consciousness, in its essential meaning, is 
the consciousness of a Being who embraces all our life and 
gives unity and direction to it, who lifts us above our- 
selves and binds our limited and transitory existence to the 
eternal. ... To think, to feel, to will — all the forms of 
our consciousness — are ultimately bound up with the idea 
of an all-comprehending whole; and to believe in a God 
is, in the last resort, simply to realize that there is a prin- 
ciple of unity in that whole, akin to that which gives unity 
to our own existence as self-conscious beings." Edward 
Caird, "The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philoso- 
phers/' Vol. 1, pp. 32-33. 

"The Christian confidence in God begins so far back as 
to include the confidence that we naturally have in our- 
selves — in our senses, our rational faculties, and our moral 
powers. It includes confidence in the world as an honest 
world and the universe as a universe of reality arid truth, 
in which knowledge is trustworthy and religion is not vain; 
. . . confidence that the rational order is grounded in the 
eternal reason and the moral order in the eternal right- 
eousness. . . . Indeed, it is in the strength of this primal 
confidence that we respond to the Christian revelation 
itself. When we put our trust in the God of Jesus Christ, 
that which speaks in the voice of faith is the soul claiming 
its birthright; for such a God is the birthright of man." 
W. N. Cjlarke, "The Christian Doctrine of God," pp. 465- 
466. 

"From the first, Power was — I knew. 
Life has made clear to me 
That, strive but for closer view, 
Love were as plain to see." 

R. Browning, "Reverie" in "Asolando." 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MASTER LIGHT AND THE 
BEING OF GOD 

I tried to show you in the last chapter 
that any theory of the worth or worthless- 
ness of the universe must be brought to 
the test of its supreme achievement. The 
fact of man's presence here as the legitimate 
child of the world's life, and all that this fact 
involves, must be taken into account when 
we would measure the meaning of the other 
facts and principles which science has made 
clear to us, and of their place in a universe 
of reality. 

Now this utter involvement of man with 
the universe, which is the discovery of biol- 
ogy, remains the problem of theology. If 
man is here, not as a stranger, not as an 
alien, but as an organic strand of the great 
bundle of life, it is of the utmost importance 
for him to know, or to come as near to know- 
ing as he may, what is the nature of that 
which lies at the heart of the bundle. If 

[75] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

anything is certain in the world it is this, 
"that fundamental ideas about life rule life," 
and that men and nations will find their real 
worth depending upon their ruling concep- 
tions of what lives and works and rules in 
the universe. Hence we have come to the 
gravest of all problems — the Being of God. 
We have here to face two questions. The 
first has to do with the existence of God; 
the second with the character of God. 



I 

Is there a God at all? That is our first 
question. May I begin by admitting frankly 
that it is a question which can never be an- 
swered in any way that shall be equally con- 
vincing to every mind? The very nature 
of our question puts strict demonstration 
out of court. The fact of God's existence 
cannot be "proved" as science, for example, 
proves her smaller facts; nor yet as the 
man of logic marshalls his truths, by the 
aid of magic syllogisms. But all this need 
not disturb us in any way. For after all it 
is an exceeding small fragment of truth that 
reaches us by the way of demonstration ; and 

[76 J 



THE BEING OF GOD 

there are other paths by which truth may be 
approached than that blazed out by logic. 
This is why the old abstract arguments for 
the existence of God, in which our fathers 
so delighted, have now been largely aban- 
doned. It is seen now that, however they 
may seem to help men, no man ever attains 
to a knowledge of God through such argu- 
ments alone. Indeed, some have even lost 
the God they had while seeking to prove 
that they had him. It was of such abstrac- 
tions that the young and facetious mind of 
the eighteenth century expressed its judg- 
ment when it said of Samuel Clarke's Boyle 
Lectures on "The Being and Attributes of 
God," that no one doubted the existence of 
God until Clarke sought to prove it. The 
fact is that we are here not in the region of 
intellectual abstractions at all, but of con- 
crete realities, of experience, of life. And 
it is, as a later Dr. Clarke has said, "by the 
testimony of other facts, or realities, reason- 
ably interpreted, that the existence and 
character of God must be established." 

Most of you know something of the ways 
by which men have sought intellectually to 
arrive at the knowledge, or the probability, 

[7T] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

of the existence of God. There is first of all 
the way of modern science; though, as we 
have seen, that way does not lead us very 
far. Science is occupied with the tremen- 
dous and honorable task of exploration. It 
is searching for the facts of the universe. 
But behind the facts the chief men of science 
now venture to postulate at least an "inscru- 
table Power," to account for them. We 
owe that very phrase, along with some bet- 
ter things, to the late Mr. Herbert Spencer. 
Toward the close of his career he acknowl- 
edged that "the consciousness of an inscru- 
table Power manifest to us through phe- 
nomena has been growing ever clearer, and 
must eventually be freed from all its imper- 
fections." I suppose that Christian think- 
ers are expected to be grateful for this 
admission. It is true that we are upon the 
borders of philosophy here, yet this vision 
of an ultimate Reality accounting for "mat- 
ter" and "energy," even though it goes 
undefined, still makes a doctrine of God 
possible. And it may be worth while to 
recall some words of Mr. J. A. Symonds, 
the historian of the Renaissance. "It can- 
not be too emphatically insisted on," he said 

[78] 



THE BEING OF GOD 

once, "that the much-dreaded Darwinism 
leaves the theological belief in a Divine 
Spirit untouched. In other words, spiritu- 
ality is restored to nature." By this last 
phrase he claims that science has recovered 
from the profane handling to which it had 
been subjected by the naturalistic philoso- 
phers who declared that the universe was 
nothing but a vast soulless machine. As 
time goes on this is becoming more and more 
evident. M. Bergson tells us in his recent 
"Huxley Lecture" (May, 1911), that he 
doubts "that the evolution of life will ever 
be explained by a mere combination of me- 
chanical forces. Obviously there is a vital 
impulse . . . something which ever seeks to 
transcend itself, to extract from itself more 
than there is — in a word, to create. Now, 
a force which draws from itself more than 
it contains, which gives more than it has, is 
precisely what is called a spiritual force ; in 
fact, I do not see how otherwise spirit is to 
be defined." Elsewhere in the same great 
lecture, M. Bergson says that "what we call 
'the mind' is, before all, something conscious 
— it is consciousness." And he defines con- 
sciousness as "a force essentially free and 

[™] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

essentially memory," and again, as an "es- 
sentially creative force." 

Now, of course, all this is the peculiar 
dialect of philosophical science; but the 
point to notice is that it does not forbid 
our asking: Whence has this mind, this 
consciousness, this creative force which is 
free and has memory, arisen? We are far 
indeed from mere talk of physical force, or 
energy. We have been led by science itself 
to speak of a vital impulse, of a spiritual 
force which is behind all, and in all, and 
which gives .purpose and meaning to all. 
We need not be afraid of the scientist then, 
he works under a profound conviction of the 
intelligibility of the universe, and the more 
honestly he works and thinks, the more the 
results of his work and thought are made 
known, the more impossible will it seem to 
men to account for this wonderful universe 
of ours except upon the belief that within 
it is a Creative Intelligence, that behind all 
physical forces lie spiritual forces, that the 
physical life itself moves and has its being 
in a spiritual life, that — in a word — the only 
rational explanation of the phenomena of 
nature is God. 

[80] 



THE BEING OF GOD 

Another way by which men have sought 
to arrive at the conviction of God's exist- 
ence is the swift and secret path of human 
intuition. It is the solitary way of the mys- 
tic. Upon this path you will hear no argu- 
ment such as philosophers use, and none of 
the instruments of research so dear to the 
scientist will be found thereon; you will 
hear only the bold language of assertion, 
and see only the ecstatic vision of the indi- 
vidual seer. Yet, and in spite of its vaga- 
ries, mysticism has a legitimate function in 
the process of spiritual discovery and has 
inspired some of the greatest religious lit- 
erature of ancient and modern times. Like 
Aurora Leigh, the true mystic beholds God 
everywhere, — 

"Earth's crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God." 

The mystic does not search for God. He 
believes that no one by searching can find 
out God. God finds him. He simply sees 
God as Faust saw him, — 

"The All-enfolding, 
The All-upholding. 
Folds and upholds He not 
Thee, Me, Himself ?" 
[81] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

There is no process of reasoning here. All 
is immediate rapt apprehension. It is the 
spiritual eye seeing what it longs to see, and 
making no effort to test the validity of its 
vision. The vivid impression of God's pres- 
ence and power in nature and in his own soul 
is enough for the mystic. To seek to know 
more of God than is immediately vouch- 
safed to him would seem an impertinence 
to be rebuked. It was surely the mystical 
mind of the ancient Greek that created the 
deathless story of Cupid and Psyche. "Ah! 
why light our little candles," it seems to say, 
"to look curiously upon that which brings 
us life and hope, joy and love? See what 
happens when we do. The god vanishes to 
return only after bitter penances and weary 
experiences." And this is the fundamental 
characteristic of mysticism in all its forms. 
Unchecked by any other mode of appre- 
hending God it leads to the wildest emo- 
tionalism, and to a sort of inferno of 
delirious theology. But safeguarded, cor- 
rected, purified by sober thought and by 
the moral inspirations of social service, mys- 
ticism lies at the heart of all religion worth 
having and all philosophy worth while, and 

[82] 



THE BEING OF GOD 

lends support and enforcement to man's 
eternal quest after God. 

Then there is a third way which is, we 
may say, merely the second way thought 
out. It is the way of Self-consciousness. 
Let me put the argument in its most famil- 
iar form without criticizing it. Along with 
the awareness of Self in man has gone the 
sense of Another Self from which he can 
no more escape than from the air which he 
breathes. God presses upon, "haunts" the 
human spirit, making his awful presence 
felt in the deeps of man's nature. This 
sense of God within man is itself the veri- 
fication of something that corresponds to it. 
It is not self-created. If there were no God 
at all man would be incapable of thinking 
so tremendous a thought as that of his ex- 
istence. God is, so to speak, not only 
assumed but really involved in the very 
structure of human personality; so that 
thinking, man thinks God; feeling, he feels 
his utter dependence upon God; and will- 
ing, he becomes aware of the urgency of 
another and a higher will ever pressing upon 
his own. 

Now we have not learned very much 

[83] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

about God as yet. But I wish to point out 
that most speculation concerning the exist- 
ence of God proceeds along one or the other 
or a combination of these three ways so 
inadequately outlined. All that we can just 
now assert is our profound conviction that 
God does exist. But of the nature of this 
God whom we say exists we have learned 
little. We have simply reached the idea of 
an Ultimate Reality which is Mind, Will, 
Spirit; but whether this Ultimate Reality 
works for us or not, of that we have learned 
nothing. But this is just what we most need 
to know. God as Power, as Creative In- 
telligence, as 

"a flash of the will that can, 
Existent behind all laws: that made them, and, lo, 
they are!" 

is a conception which by itself might make 
the moral hope of the race a ghastly irony. 
The very idea of Power frightens us until 
we learn of what sort it is. How, then, may 
we come to know it? This is the question 
to which we must now turn. 



[84] 



THE BEING OF GOD 



II 

We have agreed in this inquiry that man 
must be the measure of all things, that for 
our perfect measure we must appeal to the 
highest we know, and that this highest and 
best is the man Christ Jesus. So even here, 
if our intellectual, social, moral and religious 
life is not to fall into utmost confusion, we 
can dare the assertion that God must at least 
be Christ-like. What God is in himself 
and to himself we may never know, but 
what God is in his relation to us we must 
discover if our life is to have any meaning. 
What, then, has come to us by this fourth 
way, the mind of Christ? We speak of the 
disclosure 6f God in the mind of Christ. 
What is it of God that we find expressed 
there?; It is this — and it is the most vital 
thing for us — the character of God. This 
is what we most needed to know. We heard 
of God through the researches of science, 
we caught glimpses of him by intuition in 
nature, we felt him in the deeps of our con- 
sciousness, but all our soul cried out to know 
him. How does God feel toward me? Does 

[85] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

he care in the least for my little life set in 
the midst of the awful forces of nature? 
Will he help me to realize my destiny as a 
spiritual being? 

Now these are questions touching the 
character of God and his relations to man- 
kind, and they are answered by Christ in 
two ways: in w r ords and in deeds. Of 
course you will find in the words of Jesus no 
abstract statements, no definitions of God 
such as philosophers and theologians have 
delighted in. Jesus never discussed the 
"Absolute," he never catalogued what are 
known as the "attributes" of God. That 
was not his task. He did more than that: 
he revealed God in ways which man could 
understand, in the only way indeed by which 
man could really learn what God is like — 
the practical concrete way of a personal life 
lived openly before men. He called men 
to see God manifested in his own life. "I 
and the Father are one." "He that hath 
seem me hath seen the Father." Whatever 
else we may venture to think about Jesus 
we are bound to admit that he claimed to 
have made an adequate revelation of God's 
nature, will, and relations to mankind. He 

[86] 



THE BEING OF GOD 

did not hesitate to call himself "the light 
of the world," and to declare that his su- 
preme business on earth was to manifest 
God. Indeed it is not too much to assert 
that the whole life of Jesus as reflected in 
the Gospels is bounded by his tremendous 
conviction that he lived in the Father, and 
the Father lived in him, that the works 
which the Father did he did also. And what 
works they were! As we turn over the 
leaves of the precious stories of his career 
we see Jesus healing men of their sicknesses, 
showing pity to the unfortunate, teaching 
the ignorant, facing the vilest evil in men 
with a lovingness and a patient goodness 
that conquered it and won their hearts. 
And in all that life of perpetual ministry 
we are asked to discern not alone the grace 
and truth of Jesus, but also the grace and 
truth of the Father who sent him; not sim- 
ply a few scattered deeds of mercy, but in 
those deeds a manifestation of the Eternal 
Mercy at the heart of things, a creative 
Lovingkindness ever at work for our re- 
demption. "My Father worketh hitherto 
and I work" is a declaration which connects 
in a vital way the eternal work of God with 

[ST] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

the temporary (if the term be allowed for 
a moment) work of Jesus. The conviction 
that he was manifesting in the field of time 
the eternal creative work of the Father 
never left him. In the solemn valedictory 
prayer recorded in the Fourth Gospel these 
great words occur: "I have glorified thee 
on the earth, I have finished the work which 
thou gavest me to do, I have manifested thy 
name." Here is something that was either 
the baldest and most pathetic of illusions, 
or else a supreme truth which declares that 
we have in the mind of Christ and the deeds 
which expressed it our incomparable meas- 
ure of the mind of God. And when at last 
we look long and earnestly on this "strange 
Man upon his Cross" we discern not the 
Saviourhood of Christ alone, but the very 
Saviourhood of God himself. Here the 
mind of Christ yields the highest and holi- 
est revelation of the Divine that can ever 
be made to man. The sacrificial soul of our 
Lord as the measure of the Sacrificial Soul 
at the core of the universe — surely human 
thought cannot transcend that! 

But the mind of Christ expressed itself 
also in definite teaching, and when we turn 

[88] 



THE BEING OF GOD 

to that teaching to know the attitude of God 
toward our world of suffering, struggling, 
sinning, aspiring humanity, what do we 
find? It is all summed up in the amazing 
phrase of one of his disciples: God is love. 
To Jesus everything he saw and experienced 
spoke of a ceaseless creative Love as the 
power at the heart of our world. Nature 
was never to him "red in tooth and claw with 
ravine." Behind the falling sparrow was 
love. It was love that fed the birds of the 
air and clothed the flowers of the field with 
beauty. Within the common processes of na- 
ture worked the spiritual forces of love, and 
man, the legitimate child of nature, could 
trust those forces and cooperate with them. 
His teaching concerning the kingdom of 
God was pressed home to the mind by illu- 
minating analogies drawn from nature. It 
is like the "one pearl of great price," which 
the merchant found; it is like a "treasure 
hidden in a field." Or, closer still, and from 
the very processes of nature: It is like 
"leaven which a woman took and hid in three 
measures of meal till it was all leavened." 
It is like "a grain of mustard seed," that 
grows large enough to become a haven for 

[89] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

the birds. And it is like a seed growing 
secretly, "no man knoweth how/' and yet 
the great harvest of ripened fruit comes. 
One cannot read the nature-parables with 
any care without discerning that "the Infi- 
nite and Eternal Energy through which all 
things proceed" is, in the mind of Christ, 
essentially redemptive energy, the ceaseless 
energy of Almighty Love. And when Jesus 
would bring his own consciousness of this 
Infinite and Eternal Love-energy to the 
hearts and lives of his contemporaries he had 
only one name for it, the name Father : the 
holiest, tenderest word ever spoken to the 
sinful, troubled heart of man. With that 
word the revelation of God in the mind of 
Christ was complete, and the task of men 
in all the ages that have followed has been, 
through an increasing possession of the 
mind of Christ, to advance in the under- 
standing of the meaning of that name and 
the world-function for which it is the ade- 
quate symbol. 

We shall have more to say of this when 
we come to discuss the value of man, but 
it is hoped that the last two paragraphs will 
not be dismissed with scorn because of the 

[90] 



THE BEING OF GOD 

brief and inadequate manner in which they 
have been written. God is more and greater 
than our greatest thought of him, he is 
more and greater than any symbol we can 
use to describe him. We may think of 
God as Light for the conscience, as Truth 
for the mind, as Love for the heart, as the 
Eternal Good-will forever acting even when 
we do not recognize his activity; yet when 
we have gathered together all our concepts 
and symbols it must be with the recognition 
that the Infinite Reality which corresponds 
to these must be greater than them all. God 
is beyond our definitions, but he is not there- 
fore beyond our apprehension. The con- 
viction that God is love is something far 
grander and deeper than a mere mental con- 
cept, it is a spiritual intuition which arises 
into consciousness as the mind that was in 
Christ becomes the mind that is in us. 

The distinction so disastrously common a 
few years ago and still maintained by some 
teachers, between God as the Creator of 
man and the Father only of the consciously 
Christian man, has no place in the mind 
of Christ. There God is seen as ceaseless 
creative Love ; there Creatorship is Father- 

[91] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

hood. As we have already seen, God as 
creative intelligence may be a sublime idea, 
but it adds very little to the "Infinite and 
Eternal Energy" which science postulates 
for us; and God as "a flash of the will that 
can, existent behind all laws," tells us noth- 
ing of worth as to his relation to us. God 
might be all these and yet be nothing greater 
than the Setebos before whom Caliban grim- 
aced and cringed in cowardly fear. But in 
the mind of Christ, intellect, power and will 
work through love, and are gathered into a 
true unity of perfect personality in the title 
"Holy Father." With the conviction of the 
Fatherhood of God we can enter into those 
intimate personal relations with him through 
which we not only find life but also interpret 
life. 

And when we ourselves are thinking in 
a truly Christian manner we never think 
of God except in the terms of Jesus Christ. 
It is of the "God and Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ" that we think. And when 
once we have really seen the Christ, we know 
that we have seen our God manifested in 
him who declared himself to be the Light of 
the World, and his one business on earth to 

[92] 



THE BEING OF GOD 

manifest forth God. This is what we mean, 
at least what some of us mean, when we 
speak of the mind of Christ as absolute for 
all Christian thought and experience of 
God. We feel that the truth with which 
we there come in contact is the ultimate 
truth of God; the fountain light of all our 
day, the master light of all our seeing, and 
that it claims our absolute devotion. For 
the vital thing is that as we come to experi- 
ence the mind of Christ we become conscious 
of God at work in His world and upon our 
own souls. To us, as to St. Paul in the 
first Christian century, "there is one God, 
the Father, of whom are all things, and we 
unto him; and one Lord Jesus Christ 
through whom are all things, and we 
through him." 

This is the Gospel for our age then. It 
is the Gospel of redemptive creation. It 
declares that the "energy," the "mind," the 
"will" of science and philosophy is Love, 
and defines its relations to mankind in the 
personal terms of Fatherhood. The very 
heart of this Gospel is its revelation of a 
God who works, and who works for all men 
all the time in all worlds: a Saviour-God 

[93] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

the same yesterday, today and for ever, 
whose character and purpose are truly dis- 
closed in the mind of Christ, and whose 
service is perfect freedom. Having the 
mind of Christ we can say: "I believe in 
God. I believe in God the Father. I be- 
lieve in God the Father Almighty. I believe 
in God the Father Almighty whose nature 
is Holy Love." 



[94J 



THE MASTER LIGHT AND THE 
VALUE OF MAN 



"What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" Psalm 
8:4. 

"Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many 
sparrows." St. Matt. 10: 30. 

"How much then is a man of more value than a sheep?" 

St. Matt. 12:1. 



"The final religion must be one that has a worthy thought 
of man, and provides a task for him which will furnish the 
will with an adequate object and a supreme inspiration." 
B. P. Bowne, "Personalism," p. 299. 

"The cardinal appeal to history can find no higher norm, 
no more ultimate standard for the knowledge of what 
man's nature is than the Person of Christ. In His per- 
sonality we have the concentration of His teaching and 
its authorization. What then are the primary realities of 
human nature revealed by the personal attitude of Jesus 
Christ to the seen and unseen worlds? The answer is 
chiefly, three, namely, the fellowship of God and man, the 
identification of the individual with human society, and the 
absolute and eternal worth of moral achievement." H. 
Wheeler Robinson, "The Christian Doctrine of Man," 
p. 280. 

"Alone in all history, he (Jesus Christ) estimated the 
greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you 
and me. .He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and 
evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world." 
R. W. Emerson, The Cambridge "Address," July 15, 1838. 



CHAPTER V 

THE MASTER LIGHT AND THE 
VALUE OF MAN 

In an earlier chapter we accepted the 
declaration of science that man is the legit- 
imate child of the world's life; and we 
found it impossible to discuss the vital prob- 
lems of today apart from the frank recogni- 
tion of man's unseparable and intimate 
kinship with the Universe. We even exalted 
him to the seat of judgment concerning the 
worth of things around him. This was a 
bold thing to do, for it assumes that man 
himself is of supreme worth. We have now 
to discuss the validity of this assumption. 

We ask : Has our personality any perma- 
nent worth amid the tremendous forces and 
processes of nature? This is no mere aca- 
demic question, but one of supreme and 
practical concern to every man who thinks 
and feels, aspires and strives ; and it has by 
no means always been answered in the af- 
firmative. There is an aspect of science in 

[97] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

which man appears as but little removed 
from the brute of the jungle; there is a 
conception of philosophy in which human 
personality appears shorn of all distinction 
and permanence; and there is a conception 
of theology in which man appears so sep- 
arated from God that he loses both moral 
worth and moral aspiration. It is the mis- 
fortune of our times that these withering 
conceptions of life have found popular 
expositors. Discredited by the nobler pro- 
gressive thinkers of our day they yet reap- 
pear in cheap books and cheaper reprints 
that are the chief mental diet of half-devel- 
oped minds. An acute critic has declared 
that throughout the evolutionary philoso- 
phy, as expounded by the late Mr. Herbert 
Spencer, "human society, human history, 
human existence is but an incident in the 
measureless process of the cosmos. It is a 
late comer in the immemorial play of the 
physical order; it is the remembrance of a 
guest that tarrieth but for a day." In this 
view humanity has not only lost its position 
in relation to God, but has fallen even below 
nature. Man here is not the judge, but the 
sport of the universe. 

[98] 



THE VALUE OF MAN 

I 

A distressing suspicion of the truth of 
this view of man has again and again in- 
vaded essentially believing minds in every 
generation. Thousands of years before 
Herbert Spencer made his gloomy general- 
izations the Hebrew poet who wrote the 
Eighth Psalm had felt its blighting influ- 
ence. An eccentric expositor once chose to 
paraphrase the fourth verse of that Psalm 
as follows: "What is man? How great he 
must be, how mighty in intellect, how won- 
derful in soul, that thou, God, art mindful 
of him!" We readily concur in this exposi- 
tor's exalted estimate of man, but we are 
compelled to deny the validity of his inter- 
pretation of the poet's mood. That mood 
was rather one of doubt and bewilderment, 
the result of an inner conflict in which 
pessimism and optimism fought for the 
mastery. The poet's recognition of man's 
lordship over nature lacks the note of confi- 
dence. That man was made a little lower 
than God was an ancient article of his creed, 
but he gave to it only a reluctant wondering 
assent. The predominant thought in his 

[99] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

mind was that of the insignificance of man 
amid the vast forces of nature; and this 
thought tempered his ecstasy over man's 
greatness. 

Now this mood, in spite of many high 
visions which seem to contradict it, is the 
prevailing mood of the Old Testament. 
"Behold, thou hast made my days as hand- 
breadths; and my life is as nothing before 
thee; surely every man at his best estate 
is altogether vanity." This sense of the 
brevity and the serious limitations of human 
life is to be found in poet and prophet and 
historian alike. "Thou hast made men like 
fish of the sea, like worms that have no 
ruler." Men are "like grass which groweth 
up. In the morning it flourisheth and grow- 
eth up; in the evening it is cut down and 
withereth. For we are consumed in thine 
anger, and in thy wrath are we troubled." 
"Behold," cries Eliphaz, voicing the thoughts 
of the common people of his day, "he put- 
teth no trust in his servants, and his angels 
he chargeth with folly: how much more 
them that dwell in houses of clay, whose 
foundation is dust, who are crushed like the 
moth." 

[100] 



THE VALUE OF MAN 

The Book of Job has been justly called 
the world's greatest epic of sorrow. It is 
written with a certain bravery of soul which 
appeals to every human heart, yet its intel- 
lectual courage falters before its own prob- 
lem, and the attempted solution at the close 
is pathetic in its real futility. Ecclesiastes 
is the monumental expression of pessimism 
and disillusion in the midst of the command- 
ing activities of life. It leaves us with a 
feeling of the utter vanity of human exist- 
ence. All that we see and experience is "a 
life of nothings, nothing worth." 

It is true that this profound sense of the 
worthlessness of human life is relieved by 
many glorious visions of a coming redemp- 
tion in which both man and nature will 
share, and even by visions of the worth of 
the present life. There is the lofty concep- 
tion of man in the opening chapters of Gen- 
esis, as created in the divine image — a con- 
ception which has proved supremely fruit- 
ful in modern theology. But that concep- 
tion is followed immediately by the story of 
the fall of man, and a thick cloud rests ever 
upon the divine image. Then there is the 
consciousness of the worth of the individual 

[101] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

which we find in the great preaching of Jere- 
miah and Ezekiel. And there are other pas- 
sages which must be familiar to you. But 
these " ventures of faith" of the bolder spirits 
seemed but prophetic madness to a people 
oppressed by the suspicion of their insig- 
nificance for God. An optimistic prophet 
might indeed cry, "The grass withereth, the 
flower fadeth; but the word of our God 
shall stand for ever." But the rooted con- 
viction in the hearts of men was "The grass 
withereth, the flower fadeth, because the 
breath of Jahveh bloweth upon them ; surely 
the people is grass." The vision of her su- 
preme souls so far outdistanced the achieve- 
ment of the nation as itself to breed a kind 
of despair. That the Old Testament rap- 
ture in God is very real and significant 
many beautiful lines testify, 

"Whom have I in heaven but thee? 
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides 
thee." 

But this rapt personal vision and desire is 
perpetually being dimmed by the prevailing 
and melancholy doubt regarding the human 
race, its relation to nature in which it is set, 

[102] 



THE VALUE OF MAN 

and its significance for God toward whom 
it so stormily aspires. 

When we open our New Testament we 
find ourselves in an entirely new world of 
thought and feeling. Old things have 
passed away, and all things have become 
new. Man has attained a new and a per- 
manent dignity: "Now are we the sons of 
God." He knows, or may know, himself 
as the temple of the Holy Spirit, as living 
and moving and having his very being in 
the life of the Eternal. The commanding 
note to which all the music of the New Tes- 
tament is set is this: "Who shall separate 
us from the love of God?" And the sublime 
vision which fills the soul is a vision of the 
infinite progress of humanity in moral worth 
under the immediate influence of an indwell- 
ing God. Here, surely, is a great gain in 
self-reverence and moral confidence, a great 
trust in a God not far from any man, in a 
power working mightily in the human soul, 
and a great optimism which dares to take 
account of the sorrow and sin and tragedy 
of the world, and yet rises victoriously above 
them. This new world of thought and feel- 
ing and insight demands an explanation. 

[103] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

Whence has it arisen? Upon what founda- 
tion has it been reared? The Christian an- 
swer is : It has arisen in the mind of Christ. 
It has been reared upon the teaching and 
personality of the man Christ Jesus. The 
truth of the infinite value of the human soul 
was first definitely set forth in the teaching 
of Jesus. That truth became eminently 
fruitful in succeeding generations because 
men came to see that it was incarnated in 
an ideal way in the personality of the 
Teacher, and that through him, through the 
impact of his mind upon them, it inspired 
and shaped their lives. 



II 

Let us look at this for a while. There 
is the direct teaching of Jesus. Let me 
remind you at the outset of the folly of 
expecting to find in that teaching anything 
like a philosophic doctrine of man. Jesus 
concerned himself with neither the philoso- 
phy nor the psychology of man. For any 
statement of man's origin as science under- 
stands it, and for any analysis of the human 
intellect, you will look in vain. You must 

[104] 



THE VALUE OF MAN 

look elsewhere for these things. One of the 
glories of Plato lies in his exaltation of the 
human mind, in setting the reason of man 
far above the phenomenal world around 
him. "All the philosophers are agreed," he 
said, "that mind is the king of heaven and 
earth" (Philebus 28) . But his kingly judge 
and "spectator of all time and existence" 
can only be the achievement of the very few, 
of the elect minds in each generation. It 
is not surprising, therefore, that Plato held 
the common man in great contempt. Like 
the Pharisees four hundred years after him, 
he would have said, "But this multitude that 
knoweth not the law are accursed." 

It is the glory of Jesus that he exalted 
the whole race, that it was just with the 
worth of the multitude he was concerned, 
with the value of man as man apart alto- 
gether from his position in the scale of intel- 
ligence. It is evident that his concern was 
not with the supreme souls of his age only, 
but with the whole suffering, aspiring, hu- 
man race. He discovered and exalted the 
average man. It was to his own disciples 
that he said, "Are not two sparrows sold for 
a penny? and not one of them shall fall to 

[105] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

the ground without your Father: but the 
very hairs of your head are all numbered. 
Fear not therefore: ye are of more value 
than many sparrows." But that this value 
was not confined to the conscious disciples 
is attested by many a noble saying; but by 
none more definitely than this epigram- 
matic justification for doing good on the 
Sabbath Day, addressed to the Pharisees, 
"How much then is a man of more value 
than a sheep I" 

Now the contrast in both these sayings is 
between nature and man; and the declara- 
tion of Jesus is that they both have worth 
for God. St. Paul, in an unusual mood of 
irony, might ask, "Is it for oxen that God 
careth?" But the possibility of such a ques- 
tion falling from the lips of Jesus has only 
to present itself to be immediately rejected. 
The figure of Jesus as the lover of nature 
is permanently enshrined in the imagination 
of mankind. The sparrows on the house- 
top, the sheep on the hill-side, the very lilies 
of the field — how Jesus loved them all! If 
we dare to think of them today as all some- 
how included in the thought and love of our 
heavenly Father, it is because they were so 

[106] 



THE VALUE OF MAN 

included in the mind of Christ. So closely 
did he associate the processes of nature with 
the activities of the Eternal Good- will that, 
as long as the sun continues to shine and 
the rain to fall, we are perpetually reminded 
that the lovingkindness of God covers alike 
the evil and the good, the just and the un- 
just. So then this happy contrast between 
sparrow and disciple, between sheep and 
man, comes to us with an increased signifi- 
cance, because it is not the contrast of a mind 
that had no care for nature, but of one that 
had discovered how infinitely beyond the 
worth of nature is the value of the human 
soul. In the mind of Christ the life of man 
is so precious that he can declare that noth- 
ing else can be valued against it. In one 
profound passage he does set the soul of 
man in contrast with the totality of nature, 
only to dismiss it with a memorable ques- 
tion: "What doth it profit a man to gain 
the whole world and forfeit his life? or what 
shall a man give in exchange for his life?" 
In the vast world of nature Jesus could 
think of nothing of sufficient value with 
which to make the exchange. 

Then there is the attitude of Jesus toward 

[107] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

children. Here we gain a fresh and fruitful 
suggestion of his doctrine of man. How 
large a place children filled in the mind of 
Christ we can see the moment we bring the 
passages and incidents together. There 
are the recorded healings of children — the 
daughter of Jairus, the nobleman's little 
son, the epileptic boy, the heathen woman's 
child. His public life was perpetually in 
touch with childhood. Early in his ministry 
Galilean mothers brought their children to 
him that he might bless them, and at the 
tragic end little children sang their tri- 
umphal song to him in the temple at Jeru- 
salem. One likes to think of them as the 
very children whom he had previously 
blessed. Then there are his own references 
to childhood. We have his parable of chil- 
dren playing in the market-place. And 
among the great and solemn words ad- 
dressed to the repentant Peter, these have 
never been forgotten: "Feed my lambs." 
All the work done in the world for children 
has its ample justification in those three 
words alone. Every teacher in our Bible 
Schools feels that he has in them his Divine 
commission to teach, and fathers and moth- 

[108] 



THE VALUE OF MAN 

ers know that they are continuing the work 
of Jesus when they gather their children 
around the family altar for instruction and 
worship. One of the profoundest paradoxes 
of Jesus is that to become truly great one 
must attain to the humility of children. To 
receive a child in Christ's name is to receive 
him. To soil the soul of a child is to call 
down upon one a terrible woe. 

Then he gave to childhood its eternal 
"charter" when he said, "Suffer the little 
children to come unto me, and forbid them 
not, for of such is the Kingdom of God." 
We shall never get beyond the great vision 
of childhood which these words reveal. Here 
is the child hidden in the heart of an En- 
folding Presence; the Kingdom of God 
belongs to him; it is his inheritance; it is 
his by virtue of his spiritual descent. Here 
are the souls of all children, your children 
and mine, really at home in the Father's 
house because they came from God and 
belong to God. It is in the light of this 
vision that Wordsworth must be read. 

"The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar: 

[109] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God, who is our home." 

If you see in these great lines only a Pla- 
tonic philosophy bathed in the rich glow of 
poetry, you will miss their meaning alto- 
gether. But to read them in the light of 
the mind of Christ is f orevermore to see the 
souls of children as he saw them, in secret 
and natural fellowship with God. The soul 
of the child as the home of wonder and trust, 
of reverence and receptivity, of light and 
love and God — that is the final vision we 
receive through the mind of Christ. And 
this vision is of immense moment to us for 
the understanding of his estimate of human- 
ity. Here, in the Image of God in the soul 
of the child, is the vision of the eternal worth 
of man. In its light the legend of Prome- 
theus cannot live. Man is no mere Pro- 
methean adventurer snatching from the 
skies the fire of his spiritual greatness. He 
holds his mastery over nature by Divine 
Right as a son of God. He is not a receiver 
of stolen goods, but the inheritor of Divine 
gifts. 

[110] 



THE VALUE OF MAN 

But, you may remind me that, as child- 
hood is left behind, the Image of God in 
the soul may become almost unrecognizable. 
Rude, sacrilegious hands may soil and mar 
the Divine inheritance. Personal sin may 
destroy the early fellowship, and the child's 
consciousness of God be lost in the man's 
wilful estrangement from God. Well, let 
us admit the truth of all this, and what then? 
Look at the attitude of Jesus toward the 
moral failures of his own generation. Here 
his consciousness of the worth of man is 
seen in its amazing strength; for just here 
it meets its fiercest contradiction. But he 
was neither unaware of, nor afraid of, the 
contradiction. He could sum up his own 
mission to the race in no mightier words 
than these: "The Son of Man is come to 
seek and to save that which is lost." And 
in all that he says — and he says a great deal 
— about the spiritual blindness, the hard- 
ened heart, the perverted conscience and the 
enslaved will of man, he is but testifying to 
his belief in the essential greatness of human 
nature, to his impassioned confidence that 
the soul of man could yet break the bonds 
that bound him and leap into the freedom 

[in] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

of the sons of God. The irrecoverableness 
of the lost soul is no doctrine of Jesus. He 
would have heard it preached with horror 
and indignation. Degraded a man may be, 
sinking under an appalling suspicion of his 
own worthlessness for God, 

"Yet, with hands of evil stained, 
And an ear by discord pained, 
He is groping for the keys 
Of the heavenly harmonies." 

Lost a man may be, yet not so lost that God 
cannot find him, nor yet so lost that he can- 
not find himself and, in one grand moment 
of spiritual illumination, cry, "I will arise 
and go to my Father." This was how man 
appeared in the mind of Christ. The para- 
ble of the Prodigal Son is the monumental 
witness to the faith in man, no less than to 
the faith in God, by the strength of which 
Jesus moved with serene confidence and un- 
clouded vision among his contemporaries. 
"With everything against him," as Dr. John 
Watson once said, "Jesus treated men as 
sons of God, and his optimism has had its 
vindication. " 

What we are apt to forget is that the 

[112] 



THE VALUE OF MAN 

vision of an Eternal Fatherhood in God, of 
which I have already written, was not only 
the creative centre of the character and 
career of Jesus, but also the very heart of 
his teaching about man. He beheld men as 
the real sons of the Divine Father, as still 
bearing about them the indelible marks of 
their spiritual origin. And the aim of his 
teaching was to convince men of this, to help 
them to see themselves as he saw them. 
Once this divine vision was kindled in the 
soul, the battle of life was half -won; for to 
set man in the light of his value for God, 
to persuade him that he is really dear to God 
because he is a child of God, is immediately 
to give him an enormous advantage in his 
struggle upward. 

Here is the secret of the overwhelming 
impression of a loving power at the heart 
of the universe, and available for man, which 
one gains from a study of the sayings of 
Jesus. He spoke repeatedly of a King- 
dom of God. Close attention to his words 
reveals this Kingdom as no mere empire of 
a Sovereign, but a vast home, a Father's 
Kingdom, an Empire of Love. A king 
cares only for the welfare of his kingdom, 

[113] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

but a father cares for the individual child, 
cares for it, as Augustine declared, '*as if 
he had none else to care for." This convic- 
tion of the watchful and redeeming love of 
God as covering not only the race of men, 
but also each individual member of the race, 
could not be more finally nor more exquis- 
itely expressed than in Christ's own parable 
of the Lost Sheep. The mind of man has 
ever found in that parable the perfect dec- 
laration of the value of the human soul for 
God; and the heart of man has always 
drawn from it the assurance of an Unseen 
Presence within and without him, the assur- 
ance that underneath and round about man 
are the everlasting arms — the arms of an 
Almighty Father for whom every child is 
of infinite worth. 

Ill 

Here then is the teaching of Jesus. But 
greater than the teaching is the Teacher. 
"Christ stands behind everything he says." 
And it is in the light of the perfect man- 
hood of Christ Jesus that we read his sug- 
gestions of the worth of man. The great 
creative forces which have contributed to 

[114] 



THE VALUE OF MAN 

the moral progress of mankind are ideals 
and personalities. When the ideal and the 
personality are one we may be said to have 
the greatest possible creative force. Now 
it is part of the faith of the Christian thinker 
that the supreme ideal for man and the 
supreme ideal of God meet and find their 
ideal interpretation in the mind of Christ. 
The absoluteness of that mind for the 
thought and faith and hope and endeavor 
of the first disciples of Jesus has more than 
maintained itself in the thought and faith 
and hope and endeavor of his disciples in 
succeeding generations. For the supreme 
questions of the mind, for the surest guid- 
ance of the conscience, for the final conso- 
lation of the heart, the modern man still 
cries: "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou 
hast the words of Eternal Life." 

Here is the open secret of the enormous 
influence of the mind of Christ in moulding 
the thought and life of man which deepens 
and increases with the centuries. "Jesus 
imparted new values to things," admits 
Prof. George B. Foster, one of the most 
radical critics of the Gospel story. "He 
scattered new thoughts broadcast over the 

[115] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

world. But it was only his Person that 
gave these new values and these new 
thoughts that victorious power which trans- 
formed the world." Yes! and not the least 
marvellous revelation of that Person is the 
glory of his humanity. 

It is not simply that we can find no defect 
in the character of Jesus, but that we find 
there the one complete realization of ideal 
manhood ever shown to the world. And 
this ideal manhood is part of human history. 
It is an integral factor in all our thought 
of the universe. When we are seeking to 
discover the essential nature of man, and the 
ultimate character of the universe, we can 
not neglect the supreme historical manifes- 
tation of both which is granted to us in the 
mind of Christ. A philosophy and a psy- 
chology which disregard history are doomed 
as fatally inadequate. And a theology 
which renders homage to Christ as the Son 
of God, but refuses to him the throne of a 
real humanity, has already ceased to be 
Christian. Any doctrine of the Divinity of 
Christ that is reached through neglect of his 
humanity can have no conceivable relation 
to the struggling, needy race of men. 

[116] 



THE VALUE OF MAN 

It is surely not necessary to prove here 
the eternal transcendence of Jesus. I am 
profoundly sorry, indeed, for the man who 
does not feel that there is something in Jesus 
utterly and for ever above and beyond him, 
something that is not reproducible in his 
own person. Nor should it be necessary to 
prove the ultimateness of the moral thought 
and example of Jesus; though the modern 
German phrase of our times — Interim- 
sethik — would seem to imply some such 
necessity. But no proofs are inviolate 
against the vagaries of the wanton intellect. 
Surely, whether we are thinking of our own 
conduct alone, or of the conduct of our 
social, civic and national life, we men of 
the twentieth century must still share the 
profound awe of the men of the first when 
they contemplated the moral consciousness 
of their Master. The lofty moral ideals of 
Jesus, far from being merely ad interim 
ideals, are still basic for modern life and 
conduct. So the Christian thinker of today 
dares to amend the great sentence of Plato, 
quoted earlier in this chapter, and declares 
"All Christians are agreed that the mind of 
Christ is king of heaven and earth." 

[117] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 



IV 

But this is not the whole truth. Some- 
thing remains which needs special empha- 
sis in our times. It is that there is that in 
Christ which is imitable, and that the imi- 
tation of Christ is not only the task of 
humanity, but also its glorious privilege. 
For, again in St. Paul's glowing language, 
"We have the mind of Christ." It is not 
only the ideal which we see in the mind of 
Christ, but also the equipment for the repro- 
duction of that ideal in man. The Christian 
position is that the revelation of manhood 
in Christ Jesus is the revelation of a man- 
hood which we may all share. He was made 
like unto his brethren that they might be 
made like unto him. The manhood of Jesus 
belongs to us. It is our potential manhood 
that we recognize in him. It is because the 
mind of Christ is our very life that we not 
only see our manhood transfigured and en- 
throned there, but dare also to enter under 
the inspiration of that mind on the great 
and toilsome way to the City of Saints. 

For both vision and achievement then, for 

[118 ] 



THE VALUE OF MAN 

both ideal and power, man is dependent 
upon Christ. Through the mind of Christ 
the character of God is conceived, through 
the same mind the possibilities of man and 
his infinite worth for God are discovered; 
and in the living strength of that supreme 
mind man's possibilities become attainments. 
Here is the faith in which we stand. Here 
is the truth which makes the teachings of 
Jesus about man not a mockery and a de- 
spair, but an inspiration and a life. Man 
is not alone with his towering, goading 
ideals. He stands in an eternal fellowship 
of spirit and life with Christ in God. We 
are bidden to believe that we are sons of 
God, that we are joint heirs with Christ in 
all things, that all he has is ours — his cour- 
age and strength, his truth and goodness, 
all the excellence of his manhood, all the 
power of his Godhood is ours: not a thing 
will he withhold from those who put their 
trust in him. This is the Christ who belongs 
to us, and to whom we belong. He hath 
given himself for us and unto us, and we 
have the mind of Christ. Alone, man could 
but look up with longing eyes and breaking 
heart at the stars in his moral firmament; 

[ 119 ] 



I BE MASTER LIGHT 

but in the might of his Lord he can reach 
up to them, pluck them out of the highest 
heaven lorn his hie with them. We 

are living below our true manhood Yet 

are we saved by hope, The ruiud ■:: Christ 
is king ■:: heaven and earth, and in the 
strength of that mind our Divine sonship 

shall yet be perfected. 



; 12: ] 



VI 
PERSONALITY AND THE TRUTH 



"What is Truth?" St. John 18:88. 

"I am the . . . Truth." St. John 14:6. 

"The great religious movements which have stirred hu- 
manity to its depths and altered the beliefs of nations 
spring ultimately from the conscious and deliberate efforts 
of extraordinary minds, not from the blind, unconscious co- 
operation of the multitude. The attempt to explain his- 
tory without the influence of great men may flatter the 
vanity of the vulgar, but it will find no favor with the 
philosophic historian." J. G. Frazer, "Adonis, Attis, 
Osiris" (2nd ed.), p. 260, n. 3. 

"There is, indeed, no factor of change or cause of prog- 
ress known to history or human experience equal in effi- 
ciency to the great personality — the man who embodies 
some creative and causal idea. It is not nearly so true 
that great movements or moments produce great men as 
that the men create the moments. ... It is personality 
that counts in all things, and most of all in that concern- 
trated form of moral good which we call religion." A. M. 
Fairbairn, "The Philosophy of the Christian Religion/* 
p. 92. 

"The Christian religion has itself been a primary factor 
in the development of the conception and reality of per- 
sonality; the truths it declares concerning the unseen world 
point to a fuller realization of that personality. The Chris- 
tian doctrine of the relation of personality to the eternal 
order of reality, the spiritual world, is both illustrated and 
constituted through the Founder of Christianity." H. 
Wheeler Robinson, "The Christian Doctrine of Man," 
p. 278, 

"We beseech the Father of Lights, if He fs the God of 
infinite Charity we proclaim Him to be, to tell us whether 
all our thoughts of Freedom and Truth have proceeded 
from the Father of Lies; whether for eighteen centuries 
we have been propagating a mockery when we have said 
that there is a Son of God, who is the Truth, and who can 
make us free indeed." F. D. Maurice, "Theological Es- 
says," p. 90. 



CHAPTER VI 
PERSONALITY AND THE TRUTH 

Throughout the course of this little 
book we have busied ourselves with the 
application of the mind of Christ to serious 
problems of thought and equally serious 
problems of practical life. In this chapter 
I wish to go back to the beginning and try- 
to put the central principle in the clear light 
of psychology and history that it may be- 
come more fruitful in all our after- thinking. 

With Pilate, who asked the vital question 
concerning truth, we shall have little to do 
except as that question of his may be con- 
sidered as representative of the modern atti- 
tude toward the problems of life and 
thought. Whatever may have been the 
immediate emotion that prompted the ques- 
tion, one cannot help thinking that Pilate 
had known something, perhaps in an earlier 
day, of that agony which is known to all 
searchers after truth. If now he no longer 

[ 123 ] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

sought for truth, if now he no longer even 
cared to know it, his very cynicism may have 
been the last result of early disillusions. 
Perhaps nothing quite so appalling ever 
overwhelms the mind as the sense of the 
futility of all effort, the dreary suspicion 
that there is no absolute truth anywhere. 
Such a feeling may leave a man the prey 
of those baser spirits which seem to lurk in 
the abysses of personality. And if, as the 
poet Lowell once said, "every man is the 
prisoner of his date," then some pity may 
be extended to Pilate when we remember 
that his date lay within the general break- 
down of both philosophy and religion in the 
practical activities of life. It is the simple 
truth of that age which Matthew Arnold 
expresses in these sad lines: 

"On that hard, Pagan world, disgust 
And secret loathing fell; 
Deep weariness and sated lust 
Made human life a hell." 

And we may regard it as probable that Pi 
late shared to the full this disgust, loathing 
and weariness. Nothing any more had 
worth for him. He had struck all the chords 
of life he knew, and the result was a jarring 

[124] 



- 






PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 

dissonance. It is little wonder then if today 
we find an accent of cynicism and bitterness, 
of impatience and scorn, in his abrupt ques- 
tion to Jesus, "What is truth?" 

I 

Let us look at this question, however, as 
expressing the temper of the times in which 
we live. I am aware of the peril which 
attends every attempt to characterize one's 
own age. We may be too close to it to 
judge aright. We may be too much at 
the mercy of the mighty current to know 
whither it is taking us. We may be too 
bewildered by the cross-lights to see the cen- 
tral guiding pillar of flame. Yet it does 
seem certain to many of us that what has 
been called the passion for reality is the 
dominant temper of our new day. As I 
have already said the progress of physical 
science and the rapid popularization of its 
results, the rise of new sciences and philoso- 
phies and the critical methods of the last 
century have resulted largely in creating a 
bewildering sense of the complexity of 
human life and of the material world. We 
are both the inheritors and the discoverers 

[125] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

of vast realms of knowledge; and this in- 
heritance and this discovery have come upon 
us ringing with challenge. Our deepest 
spiritual convictions are questioned at every 
turn. In this new world of ours what place 
has man? What place has God? What 
are the ends toward w r hich life moves? 
Some things which our fathers easily and 
strongly believed have become unbelievable 
to us. And we ask, sometimes fearfully, 
sometimes jauntily, Does this mean that we 
have only to dive deep enough to find that 
there is no moral or religious truth at the 
bottom of the well at all? We know that 
some thoughtful men have answered this 
question in the affirmative, and have acqui- 
esced, sadly enough, in the desolating con- 
ception of an orphaned world. And many 
others seem to have lost all certitude, all 
confidence; their inner life has become a 
wild ferment, and they have fallen into the 
pathetic agnosticism which asks, "What is 
truth?" without daring to hope for an an- 
swer. Of this temper, Amiel is the most 
striking representative, and his Journal In- 
time the classic expression. 

But there is another temper which has 

[126] 



PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 

been generated by this immense new knowl- 
edge, the gift and the achievement of our 
times. It is the temper of the fighter, of 
the man with an undying passion for reality 
in his soul. It is this temper which I believe 
really dominates modern thought, research 
and criticism. It asks "What is truth?" and 
confidently looks for an answer. It refuses 
to be dismayed because the answer is not 
forthcoming at once, or along the path on 
which it first journeys. It believes that a 
profound and adequate explanation of hu- 
man ends can be found. It is the temper 
which, at the same time, has inspired the 
splendid investigations of natural science, 
and yet refused to be bound by the limita- 
tions of that science. It remains sensitive 
to spiritual things, and is so certain of the 
existence of truth that it sees traditional 
beliefs overthrown, the rubbish of the years 
cast out, and its own most cherished illu- 
sions destroyed, with a courage which, if 
not always serene, is at the least full of 
hope. Its one craving is for truth, for that 
ultimate reality in which it believes both 
man and his world will find their satisfying 
interpretation. 

[ 127 ] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 



II 

What is truth? One of the greatest an- 
swers of modern thought to this question 
comes from psychology. In its conception 
of personality and its emphasis on personal 
relations, the new psychology has opened 
for us a path and bids us walk therein if 
we would find truth. Now this is neither 
the time nor the place to enter upon an 
exhaustive analysis of the modern idea of 
personality. But one or two things may 
briefly be said, the first of which is that the 
old "faculty psychology" and the theology 
built upon it are gone for ever. According 
to that theory personality was split up into 
separate departments. It was a succession 
of different states brought about by the 
combination, or a refusal to combine, of 
really disconnected faculties. Thinking, 
willing, feeling were so many distinct and 
separate activities through which a man 
could, so to say, serve three masters with 
a cheerful sense of irresponsibility. The 
master of one's thought need not be the 
master of one's deed, nor the ruler of one's 

[128] 



PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 

head the ruler of the heart. Of course such 
a psychological Babel was doomed to de- 
struction. A house divided against itself 
cannot stand; and a personality of divided 
faculties cannot stand either. The only 
proper place for it is the padded cell. Men 
sought earnestly for some principle which 
should bind these successive agencies into 
one. Socrates had sought to find it in rea- 
son, Epicurus in feeling, and Zeno in the 
will. But modern psychology finds it in 
the whole man. It tells me that thinking, 
willing and feeling are not separate facul- 
ties, but partial aspects of the same Self. 
There is not one man in me who thinks, 
another who feels, and still another who acts. 
It is I who think and feel and act. The 
whole man is engaged in these several yet 
blended states of personality. And it is 
just here, in this unity of the conscious Self, 
that psychology finds the path to ultimate 
reality. "Personality," says R. C. Moberly, 
"involving, as necessary qualities of its be- 
ing, reason, will, love, is incomparably the 
highest phenomenon known to experience." 
The admission, which you may sometimes 
hear pressed, that human personality is not 

[129] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

yet perfect, that it is still in the making, 
is true, but it does not invalidate the above 
statement. It still remains true that per- 
sonality, as you and I know it, is the ultimate 
fact of experience: the one fact to which 
every other fact comes up for judgment. 
It may be, as James and Hoffding and 
others say, that in the last analysis person- 
ality — the real Self — remains an "eternal 
riddle." But there is no sane man who is 
not certain of his personality, even his in- 
dividuality, however little he may have 
thought about it. He knows that he is him- 
self, and not another. He knows that he 
is a person, and not a thing. And it is 
as he comes more and more to realize the 
conscious unity of his own personal life in 
thought and feeling and action that he 
reaches another emphasis of modern psy- 
chology — the sense of the value of personal 
influence and personal relations. He recog- 
nizes himself as a person living in a world 
of persons with whom he must seek relations 
if his own personality is ever to attain its 
ultimate worth to himself and to the world. 
Well, it is just here that history joins 
hands with psychology. Indeed, there is 

[ 130 ] 



PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 

nothing more striking than the unanimity 
with which the various departments of mod- 
ern thought emphasize the value of personal 
influence and relations. In the thought of 
less than a hundred years ago man was lost 
amid a whirl of impersonal forces. His- 
toric movements, whether in politics, ethics 
or religion, seemed adequately described as 
the outcome of simple, unconscious world- 
processes. Men were the creatures of their 
times, not the times the creation of men. 
Personality had dropped to its nadir. Man 
was a mere shuttlecock, tossed through the 
ages by invisible and ineluctable battledores. 
But now, though the view still feebly lives 
in certain economic interpretations of his- 
tory, the modern critical spirit, working 
alike in history and psychology, has made 
it untenable. As Prof. Villa puts it in his 
"Contemporary Psychology," — "Instead of 
considering social institutions, ideas, and 
phenomena as spontaneous products of a 
nameless multitude, modern psychology 
rightly considers them the outcome of indi- 
vidual genius, subsequently consolidated, 
diffused, and preserved for the whole species 
by imitation." In other words, the real 

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THE MASTER LIGHT 

forces of the world have been real persons. 
"Say what you will," exclaimed Goethe 
once, "everything turns in the long run 
upon the person." And the truth of that 
saying is abundantly verified by history. 
Some great personality has always stood 
on the threshold of every exodus which hu- 
manity has made from ignorance to knowl- 
edge, from darkness to light, from the 
prison-house to the open moor. Some man 
first saw upon the distant hill the fresh 
light, and announced his vision to his com- 
rades in the valley. Some man first heard 
within himself the awful voice of a new 
truth, and proclaimed it in the forum and 
the market-place. Some man first discov- 
ered a new country, and called his fellows 
to join him over-seas. And the progress of 
humanity has gone forward just in propor- 
tion as other men walked in the light, fol- 
lowed the truth and entered the new coun- 
try discovered by its commanding person- 
alities. Not all men are men of genius, not 
all can discover truth for themselves, not all 
can launch out into unknown seas to find 
new realms awaiting them on the farther 
shore. But you and I and every man can 

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PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 

follow in the footprints left by the giants 
of yesterday- And perhaps the real word 
for the vast majority of us must be the word 
of Jesus: "Others have labored, and ye 
have entered into their labors." But the 
lesson of history is before us. We must 
enter into their labors and endeavor to com- 
plete them before our own personality can 
ever become an inspiration and a strength 
to succeeding generations. 

Ill 
Here then is what has been established by 
both psychology and history; namely, that 
the great forces of the world have been per- 
sonal, and that the progress of humanity 
has resulted through its attempts to reach 
the stature of its loftiest sons. But now 
another fact faces us. "No great personality 
answers to the ideal of greatness in all the 
aspects of greatness. Great men have their 
limitations. Some have been great in action, 
some in thought, some in invention, some in 
power of poetic or prophetic vision, and 
some in other ways." The writer of these 
words asks, what you and I have asked in 
some moment of our lives: "Is there a 

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THE MASTER LIGHT 

Personality who can be to all men what 
some personalities have been to some 
men?" 

Now, we have scarcely asked that ques- 
tion when the Person of Christ stands boldly 
before us, claiming to be the adequate an- 
swer. Not only so, but the testimony of the 
centuries to the truth of that claim assails 
our ears like the sound of many waters. 
Just here we are arrested by one of the most 
striking things in history. Among all the 
philosophies and religions of the world 
whose business it was to find truth and to 
establish it, only one man has ever stood 
forward and said, "I am the truth." Pas- 
sionate prophets have spoken to men in the 
name of God; and we now know that the 
finer religious history of pre-Christian days 
was their achievement. From the days of 
Moses in Egypt to those of Cromwell in 
England, of Mazzini in Italy and of Lin- 
coln in America, men have stood at the heart 
of uncertain nations, and have felt them- 
selves called to the mightiest tasks of their 
day. From the days of Samuel in Shiloh to 
our own great days in America, men have 
stood forth boldly as the bearers of Divine 

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PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 

messages to individuals and peoples. But 
none of them all, liberators or prophets, ever 
spake with accent of Jesus. Never does he 
join with the prophets and say, "The word 
of Jahveh came unto me;" but rather, "I 
say unto you." He never seems to have 
known those tempests of doubt which shook 
a Cromwell; nor to have passed with Maz- 
zini into that "moral desert" where ideas 
and ideals seem but false and empty dreams. 
With no trace of the fatal misgiving which 
at times have overtaken the world's great- 
est, Jesus stood before the multitudes and 
cried : "I am the truth. I am the way. I 
am the light. I am the life. I am the bread 
which came down out of heaven." This 
sense of perfect Personality, of a completed 
Self, which these sayings disclose, is simply 
amazing. It would appear to place Jesus 
at once and for all time utterly above and 
beyond every man who has ever spoken to 
men in the Divine Name. 

If you remind me that all these sayings 
are from the Fourth Gospel, that they may 
not be the actual testimony of Jesus to him- 
self, but rather the expressions of a fond 
disciple who had idealized his Master, then 

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THE MASTER LIGHT 

I will call you to some other words of his, 
words which are admitted as genuine by the 
severest critics of our time. You will find 
them in the eleventh chapter of St. Mat- 
thew. "All things have been delivered unto 
me by my Father, and no man knoweth the 
Son save the Father; neither doth any know 
the Father save the Son, and he to whom- 
soever the Son willeth to reveal him. Come 
unto me all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden and I will give you rest." If there 
is anything in the Fourth Gospel more 
assertive of the consciousness of Jesus that 
all men need him, and that he is competent 
to meet the needs of all, then I have never 
read it and do not know where to look for 
it. And this great saying is not away from 
our subject. It is very close to it. For 
there is no heart-weariness so poignant, 
there is no load so heavy as that which a 
man knows who is searching for truth and 
finds only delusion. To that man Jesus 
says, "Come unto me, for all things have 
been delivered unto me by my Father;" — 
that is to say, all the things a man really 
longs to know when he asks sincerely, 
"What is truth?" 

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PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 

IV 

For what, after all, is a man seeking by 
that question? He is certainly not seeking 
for a system of logical ideas. He can find 
that among the philosophers. And just as 
certainly he is not seeking for intellectual 
statements of religion. He can find those 
in the various creeds of Christendom. He 
is really asking: What is God? What is 
man? What is my relation to God and to 
my fellowman? What is the moral signifi- 
cance of life? 

In answer to these questions Jesus directs 
the attention of men to himself. He in- 
vented no philosophical doctrine of God, he 
called him "Father." He offered no scien- 
tific definition of man, he called him "Son." 
He said that the relation of men to one 
another was to be that of brothers. He said 
that life was man's opportunity for heroism 
and self-denial, for love and great service. 
As an individual, man should aim for self- 
mastery in the inner life: let the eye be 
single, the heart pure, the thought straight. 
As a social being, man's relations were 
summed up in love as the absolute sovereign 

[ 137 ] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

lord of all personal relations. As a religious 
being, his relation to God was to be one of 
trust and hope, of fear and a great yearn- 
ing. He told men that if they had faith in 
God they could remove mountains, that if 
they feared God they would fear no one and 
nothing else. And when they wished to 
know how these could be, he said, "Come 
unto me. Learn of me. He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father. I do always the 
things that are pleasing to him. Love one 
another just as I love you. Trust God. 
Trust me. I am the way. Let not your 
heart be troubled; I am the life. Let not 
your mind be confused; I am the truth." 
And who does not see now that in defining 
God and man and life in the great terms 
of personal relations, Jesus was revealing 
the final truth about them? 

This constant pointing to himself, this 
bold interpretation of himself, now as light, 
now as truth, now as the way to the Father, 
was the whole message of Jesus to man. 
As men recognized him in these symbolic 
terms, and welcomed their recognition of 
him, they would discover his sufficiency for 
all their needs. Truth — the truth by which 

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PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 

one lives — is not a matter of the intellect 
alone, but of the whole man in personal fel- 
lowship with Christ. And that is the mes- 
sage of Jesus to the men of today. The 
centre of his moral thought is, as Prof. 
Foster acknowledges, "the unity, the whole- 
ness, the internality, and freedom of a per- 
sonality whose content is moral love." And 
when we really catch sight of the perfect 
moral personality which stands behind and 
shines through all his teaching, we begin to 
see how, indeed, he could claim to be the 
truth. For the moral thought of Jesus was 
realized in himself. There were no unreal- 
ized ideals in the character and life of Jesus. 
Not only so, but he planted his ideals as a 
creative force in the minds of his followers. 
So then it was not the ideals of Jesus 
alone, not even his moral thought, but these 
as they were incarnated in his Person and 
made available for others, that was the 
truth. "The life was the light of men." 
In the realm of moral insight Jesus himself 
was the truth ; and to be truth in that realm 
is surely to be ultimate truth ; and this truth 
becomes ours as the mind of Christ takes 
possession of our minds. Or to put this in 

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THE MASTER LIGHT 

another way, the Christian faith is that in 
the mind of Christ the mind of God was 
completely manifested, and through him the 
mind of God is being progressively mani- 
fested in humanity. 

V 

And now let me remind you, with S aba- 
tier, that He who does not collaborate with 
Jesus while listening to him will come empty 
away, "He only leads the seeker to the 
truth. He only pardons those who repent; 
or fills the hungerers and thirsters after 
righteousness." In other words, truth comes 
through action. Everywhere Jesus empha- 
sized the central importance of action; and 
it remains one of the merits of the new psy- 
chology that it is in line with Jesus here also. 
The contemplation of the mind of Christ 
is not sufficient for life. Contemplation 
must be followed by the effort to assimilate 
and reproduce the moral content it finds 
there. The nun in her narrow cell, and the 
hermit in his desert cave, wear out their lives 
in a mystic contemplation of the Divine 
Image ; but they have not so much as gained 
the first glimpse of truth of the real mind 



PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 

of Christ. It is those who are in the thick 
of life's work, fighting their own battles and 
the battles of others in faith and confidence 
and love, who are on the path that leads to 
truth. How shall I know the truth? By 
doing it. That sounds an irreconcilable 
paradox. It is really the one absolutely 
correct method. For truth is not a formula 
to be learned; it is an experience — first in 
the mind of Christ, then in the minds of his 
followers. It is something to be lived, and 
is the possession of all who will dare to live 
it. As the moral and religious content of 
the mind of Christ becomes ours through 
our obedience to its promptings, we find 
truth. It is the new heart, the new will, 
the new conscience raised to its highest 
power and keenest activity through which 
truth is revealed. 

I may believe that there is a God because 
the Bible and good men tell me so; but I 
know no single truth about God until I 
awake to his presence in my soul and begin 
to live as a son of God. Intellectually, I 
may believe in the solidarity of the human 
race; but I shall learn no truth about that 
solidarity until I begin to act toward men 

f 141 1 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

as Jesus acted. I may hold a splendid phi- 
losophy concerning the moral purpose of 
life ; but its awful, holy meaning will be for 
ever hidden from me until I set moral ends 
before me and persistently live in the light 
of eternity. 

This is what Jesus meant when he told 
Pilate that "every one that is of the truth 
heareth my voice." Pilate did not hear the 
voice of truth, he did not see the truth in 
the Christ w r ho stood before him because he 
had not been true to himself, he had not 
accustomed himself to doing the truth which 
even his own philosophers had taught him. 
To set the personalities of Pilate and Jesus 
side by side is to know — whatever vain 
things overtake us afterwards — the eternal 
distinction between truth and falsehood. It 
is also to know that truth can only become 
living and real to us as we transfer our 
search from the realm of abstractions to the 
realm of moral persons and follow him who 
made no distinction between himself and 
truth. The norm of truth is the living mind 
of Christ in the living minds of men. And 
from the moment we really welcome the 
presence and influence of the mind of Christ, 

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PERSONALITY AND TRUTH 

and sincerely strive to set our lives in accord 
with the life that was the expression of that 
mind, we begin an experience in truth which 
will continue and expand until, at last, we 
see him face to face, and know ourselves as 
he knows us. 



THE END. 



[148 J 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The following lists of books are intended to be simply 
suggestive. They happen to be books with which I am 
more or less acquainted. Others could be compiled by other 
readers. But it is hoped that these will prove helpful. 
Many of the books cover topics in other chapters than 
that in which they are named. To these should be added 
general works on theology, philosophy and psychology. 



CHAPTER I 

Adamson, F., Studies in the Mind of Christ. 
Fairbairn, A. M., The Place of Christ in Modern Theology. 
Ferris, G., The Growth of Christian Faith. 
Forrest, D. W., The Christ of History and Experience. 
Forrest, D. W., The Authority of Christ. 
Gordon, G. A., The Christ of Today. 

Mackintosh, H. R., The Doctrine of the Person of Christ. 
Ritschl, A., Christian Doctrine of Justification and Rec- 
onciliation. 
Smeaton, G., The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit. 
Walker, W. L., The Spirit and the Incarnation. 
Wood, I. F., The Spirit of God in Biblical Literature. 



CHAPTER II 

Briggs, G. A., General Introduction to the Study of Holy 

Scripture. 
Clarke, W. NT., The Use of the Scriptures in Theology. 
Dods, M., The Bible, Its Origin and Nature. 
Driver and Kirkpatrick, The Higher Criticism. 
Harris, S., The Self-Revelation of God. 
Martineau, J., The Seat of Authority in Religion. 

[H7] 



THE MASTER LIGHT 

Moffatt, J., The Historical New Testament. 
Moore, E. C, The New Testament in the Christian Church. 
Ryle, H. E., The Canon of the Old Testament. 
Sabatier, A., Religions of Authority. 
Sanday, W., Inspiration. 

Smith, G. A., Modern Crititcism and the Preaching of the 
Old Testament. 

CHAPTER III 

Bergson, H, Creative Evolution. 
Bruce, A. B., Apologetics. 

Fairbairn, A. M., The Philosophy of the Christian Re- 
ligion. 
Foster, G. B., The Finality of the Christian Religion. 
Galloway, G., The Philosophy of Religion. 
Harris, S., God the Creator and Lord of All. 
Howison, G. H, The Limits of Evolution. 
Illingworth, J. R., The Divine Immanence. 
Sabatier, A., Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion. 
Ward, J., The Realm of Ends. 
Watson, J., The Philosophical Basis of Religion. 

CHAPTER IV 

Bowne, B. P., Studies in Christianity. 

Caird, E., The Evolution of Religion. 

Clarke, W. N., The Christian Doctrine of God. 

Davidson, A. B., Article "God" in Hastings' Bible Dic- 
tionary. 

Fiske, J., The Idea of God. 

Flint, R., Theism. 

Inge, W. R., Christian Mysticism. 

Leighton, J. A., Typical Modern Conceptions of God. 

Lidgett, F. S., The Fatherhood of God in Christian Truth 
and Life. 

Royce, J., The Conception of God. 

Youtz, H. L., The Enlarging Conception of God. 

[148] 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



CHAPTER V 

Clarke, W. N., Can I Believe in God the Father? 
Drummond, H., The Ascent of Man. 
Gordon, G. A., Ultimate Conceptions of Faith. 
Gordon, G. A., The New Epoch for Faith. 
Laidlaw, J., The Bible Doctrine of Man. 
Robinson, H. W., The Christian Doctrine of Man. 

CHAPTER VI 

Bowne, B. P., Personalism. 

Brown, W. A., The Essence of Christianity. 

Buckham, J. W., Personality and the Christian Ideal. 

Illingworth, J. R., Personality: Human and Divine. 

King, H. C, Reconstruction in Theology. 

Moberly, R. C, Atonement and Personality. 



[149] 



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